


A Vision Softly Creeping

by IzzyBells



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Background Relationships, Background Reylo, Dream Violence, Flashbacks of violence, Gray Jedi (Star Wars), Jedi Philosophy (Star Wars), Mary Sue, Mild Sexual Content, Multi, POV Ben Solo, POV Original Character, Togrutas (Star Wars), i do not care that she's a mary sue it's fine, kind of gray jedi anyway? i don't really know for sure, lots of dream interactions going on, now they're just frenemies, past ben solo/oc
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-12-03
Packaged: 2021-03-09 17:41:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 31,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27690167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IzzyBells/pseuds/IzzyBells
Summary: (transferring from FF.net)post-TLJ, written pre-TROS and ignoring TROSOne student escaped Kylo Ren's massacre all those years ago and has been in hiding ever since. After Luke's death, she steps in to help turn him from the Dark Side while pondering the Light/Dark dichotomy herself.Technically Reylo, but relies on Kylo/BenxOFC backstory. T for discussion/flashback of sexual situations and violence.
Relationships: Ben Solo | Kylo Ren & Original Female Character(s), Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I think I need to begin the task of transferring my current WIPs from FF.net to here. I started on FF, but Ao3 really just has a much more pleasant interface and a waaaay better tagging system. So this is one I haven't actively worked on in over a year (like most of my WIPs oof) buuuuut I feel like it's time to dust her off and keep going with it, or at least give her the dignity of living on a nicer site. Like the description mentions, I started this after TLJ and it will VERY MUCH IGNORE TROS because I'm too committed to my own idea to try and make this in any way canon-compliant with this Palpatine bullshit.
> 
> The structure of this story will hop back and forth between OC's POV and Kylo's POV, from dream sequences to real life scenes. I also explore the Gray Jedi idea, though I'm not trying very hard to make it *actually* Gray Jedi. Kinda doing my own take on the gray area between Light and Dark.

“Ben.”

He was dreaming of a battle gone wrong, himself in the center of a crowd of enemies, all angry and armed. Her voice was a startling calm in comparison to the seething people around him, and it carried over the roar of battlecries in the way voices sometimes do in dreams.

“Ben, it’s me.”

All the world around them was pale, pale white. Cold, barren, and unforgiving. Her figure was a warm red-orange beacon against the icy vastness, beyond the sea of colorless, faceless, merciless attackers. He looked up, scars cracking.

“You remember me.”

“Of course,” he choked. Crimson blood spattered the white ice under his crouched, hunched body, blown from his lips by the words. “How could I forget?”

She stood in bright contrast to the white expanse around them, a steady flare of life amidst certain death. Beatific, her eyes were nothing but the same golden warmth they always had been, her skin not creased by any expression beyond peace. She was just as he last saw her: young, vibrant, and so tangible it gripped his heart with sudden grief and regret.

“Look at yourself, Ben. You’re so old now.”

The gentle teasing tone brought back sunny memories of his adolescence, even in the midst of his current crisis. “And you’re still so young,” he answered, swallowing the blood filling his mouth. The metallic tang stuck to his teeth and the insides of his cheeks.

“But you remember me, Ben. You can’t remember me older than this. You wouldn’t recognize me. And I can barely recognize you.”

Around him, the faceless, blank crowds were closing in, their anger deafening, blinding, burning, but he still heard her voice like a bell. They would crush him. He gasped for breath. “What do you mean?”

“You’re so filled with hatred. Everything is anger and fear. You weren’t all hate when I knew you, Ben. Don’t you remember?”

For a moment, the primal, savage terror that had slowly been building in his chest receded. Like a tide, the enemies fell back. Warmth bloomed near his sternum, and he remembered. “Yes, I remember,” he murmured. His tense limbs began to relax.

“Then why, Ben? Why are you doing this?”

He looked up again when her tone shifted to pained and desperate. The calm was gone, and her arms were tucked around her middle as if she were about to be sick. In her eyes raged a churning sea of yellow flame. Her brow had pinched up, and her gray lips were pulled wide in a grimace.

“Why, Ben?”

The hordes smothered him again, swallowing him in their wrath, and tore into him. He screamed as they ripped his body to shreds.

—

Aketaa came back to herself as if she’d been ejected out of a starfighter. Her consciousness slammed into her body, knocking her sideways into the wall of her little room. Her right lek got caught between the wood paneling and her shoulder, sending a pang all the way to the tip of her montral. She hadn’t expected to startle him so much, but she hadn’t expected his dreams to be so violent either. For a moment, she simply sat on the mattress and caught her breath. Had he woken up? she wondered. It was too dangerous to probe across the galaxy just then; he could be searching for her presence after the stunt she pulled.

This whole thing was risky. She did it because she cared, certainly, but at the same time, would she sacrifice her own safety for the chance that Kylo Ren might stumble away from the abyss of the Dark side? Her head told her she shouldn’t. Her gut couldn’t resist.

In the following weeks, Aketaa could sleep only an hour or two at a time, so anxious was she that her walls weren’t good enough to protect her location. If Kylo could sense her at all, there was a risk, too high for comfort, that he and the First Order would descend upon this little village on this little planet, blasters blazing, and destroy her and everyone she had come to care about in the last years. She went about her daily work with the Raydonian village children, teaching them their lessons with a little less focus than usual, and the younglings picked up on it easily.

“Miss Anii, is somethin’ botherin’ you? D’you have enough food? My ma an’ pa gets kinda worried when we have to eat less food, sometimes.”

“Are you sick, Miss Anii? Mama stares into space like that sometimes when she gets sick-feelin’.”

“If a grown-up’s makin’ you sad, you should tell ‘im so’s you don’ gotta be sad, Miss Anii.”

Aketaa smiled, corrected their grammar, and thanked them for their advice. It was a sweet gesture on their part, but it wasn’t as helpful as they had intended. There was nothing she could do but wait until enough time passed for Kylo Ren to dismiss her contact as a simple dream. She told them she was feeling fine and had plenty to eat thanks to their parents, but a grown-up was making her very sad indeed, though it was impossible to tell him anything.

“I need to be patient,” she told the children. “So long as I’m patient with him, things might turn out okay.”

Two months and a few days went by before Aketaa even considered reaching out again. When she did, it took another couple of days to decide how she wanted to approach the next dream. She was fully capable of showing him a memory of their shared childhood, but she felt that would be too risky this soon. Another chance appearance would be all she could get away with. So one morning, she reached out a careful tendril of her consciousness to feel for him, gently poking around the galaxy until she found the First Order fleet, and then carefully brushing against every mind she found until she found his. He was awake. It seemed, though, that he would not be awake for long. Aketaa had no lessons with the children that day, so she decided to sit in her little room and wait until Kylo Ren fell asleep.

—

“Ben.”

He was standing in a sun-bleached desert at the top of a sharp, steep cliff. She stepped up to the precipice next to him. In silence, they stood together. He barely even noticed she was there until she spoke.

“Ben, what’s at the bottom of the cliff?”

“I don’t know.” The wind caught his voice and carried it away to the flat, washed-out horizon. He swallowed; in the dry air, it felt like a thin layer of dust had coated his throat. Maybe it had.

“How would we find out?”

He swallowed again. “Jump,” he answered. “We could jump.”

Silence fell around them again, oppressive and heavy like wool. The atmosphere was thick, and he licked his lips. They were dry and flaking. His mouth felt sandy. Somewhere in the distance, a wind rattled through some brush or branches, though nothing of the sort was anywhere in sight.

“If you stay behind, I’ll jump, Ben. Then I’ll climb back up and tell you what I find.”

Before he even thought about it, his hand shot out to seize her arm. One of her bare feet was already over the edge, and she looked back up at him, questioning him with her golden eyes. Such innocent confusion was written across her young face that he almost smiled. “Don’t,” he breathed. Her back headtail smacked against his hand when she swung her head back forward. To his unexpected relief, she brought her foot back onto firm ground.

“Ben, do you remember when we met?”

His hand was still holding her arm. He looked down at his black leather glove against her colorful skin. His thumb pressed into her flesh just next to the end of one of the thick white lines that striped her shoulders. “Of course I remember,” he whispered, tongue heavy. A little girl with orange skin and tiny headtails that only brushed the tops of her shoulders, shown into Luke’s hut with her mother, a tall but hunched woman; her montrals would have poked through the roof if she hadn’t bent over. He remembered. How could he forget?

“And do you remember when we parted?”

She turned her face up to his again, her warm eyes wide. His nose was clogged with dust. He had to part his parched lips to breathe, but it only brought in more of the pale desert dirt. Didn’t she feel how this place would suffocate them both? Her front headtail fell against his wrist. He knew without feeling it that the skin would be warm and smooth against his. 

“We hurt each other, Ben.”

His lungs were burning, and he felt short of breath. He could hear how he was wheezing to take in air. Little puffs of dust blew past his lips with every exhalation.

“Ben, am I your prisoner? Your grip is tight.”

He let go of her arm to drop to his knees, staring down off the edge of the cliff into a giant white dust cloud. He coughed, hacked, choked, and couldn’t breathe. He felt her hand in his hair, gently and comforting, and he leaned into her touch between coughs without fully realizing it. Soon enough, his lungs stopped burning, and his mouth and throat and nose began to clear up. He sat back on his heels and dropped his head to her side, letting her form support the weight of his upper body.

“What happened, Ben?”

She stepped away. The ground suddenly felt very unstable.

“What happened?”

He plummeted off the edge of the cliff. The dust cloud met him long before he stopped falling, and he couldn’t breathe long before he hit the ground again.

—

It pained Aketaa to watch Kylo Ren suffer in his dreams. She could do something, change their outcomes, ease his soul at least in his sleep. But she knew she shouldn’t, and in this case Aketaa decided she should listen to her head. 

That afternoon she ate a lunch of flatbread and the fleshy pink Raydonian fruit the people here began domesticating only a couple decades ago, and she thought over her meal. The words of Master Skywalker’s Force ghost echoed in her mind: “You’ve done well to hide yourself, even from me, but it’s time to stretch those feelers out again like I know you can. Find Ben. Try to sway his mind away from the Dark side as my student Rey must focus her energies on my sister’s war. I don’t mean for you to bring him to the Light—that may not be possible—but maybe it’s time to let the old ways die. Find a balance, Aketaa. Begin again, stronger. The Force will be with you...trust it always.” 

He had placed a large, twofold burden on her shoulders. Bring Kylo Ren back from the Dark, and find a balance. A balance, he’d said. A balance. A balance of what? Old and new ways? Had Master Skywalker left it to her to decide which practices to keep and discard? It seemed like too much responsibility, especially when she hadn’t fully completed her training. 

No, he told her to start over anew. Throw out the old Jedi teachings and return to the beginning. On primitive planets, whole tribes of Force-sensitive peoples lived isolated from both the Jedi and the Sith; what did they believe? How did they relate themselves to the Force?

The Togruta naturally have a certain affinity with the Force; traditionally her people walked barefoot to feel their connection with the land. With or without the Jedi, the Force is there, always, a constant energy between every living and nonliving thing in the universe. The Jedi used it to keep the peace and the Sith used it to gain power, and both kept to the extremes of the Light and the Dark. Maybe Master Skywalker intended for her to find a balance between Light and Dark, accepting both and abhorring neither. Life isn’t black and white, so why should relation to the Force be black and white? Everything is a shade of gray, is it not?

Aketaa stood to wash her dishes. As she shuffled over the stone-paved floor of her room in the moccasins everyone in the village wore, one detail from Kylo Ren’s dream came to mind. She appeared as he remembered her from years, almost a decade, ago; when she stepped off the cliff, he hadn’t pictured her in shoes. Did she go barefoot habitually as a child? Aketaa couldn’t remember. Standing at the water pump in her room’s kitchenette, she kicked off her shoes. The damp stone was cool under her feet.

—

“Ben.”

This was an inopportune time for her to make an appearance. The woman beneath him didn’t seem to notice.

“Ben, this is just indecent.”

He knew that. Of course he knew that. It would be very much appreciated if she just went away.

“You can’t just wave me away like any other figment of your imagination.”

He sighed. This could’ve been a pleasant dream, but it just had to turn sour, didn’t it? He didn’t mind seeing her usually, but if he started associating her image with this corner of his psyche he might have to track her down and murder her. Unless, of course, she had died sometime in the past years of his life. In that case, she must be haunting him.

“We have to talk, Ben.”

Bet. The woman writhed and gave a little helpless moan. “Kylo,” she whimpered. He grit his teeth.

“I’m not enjoying this either, but we have to talk.”

“What about?” he hissed.

“You. Me. The universe.” Her young form made this all the worse, and the effect of her vague statements spoken in a child’s voice sent an extremely unwelcome shiver down his spine. 

No. She was in his head, just an old memory. “Enough,” he growled, and forced her out of his dream.

—

A bad headache lingered behind her brow through the next day, and Aketaa vowed to pay more careful attention to his mood before entering his mind the next time. It wasn’t that what she saw left her with the taste of bile in her mouth, even though it did; being personally thrown out apparently had side effects. Before when she’d been booted out of Kylo’s head, it was because his dream was over and she was ejected like a guest whose allotted time was up. This time, he had mentally manhandled her out himself.

The harvest season had arrived in this sector of Raydonia, so all of Aketaa’s students were working with their parents until winter. She excused them after she made them promise to practice their reading on their own, so long as their other chores were done first. As much as Aketaa believed education was important, she wouldn’t come between her students and their families; she had no right to tell them to put off their work for her. Without lessons with the children to occupy her and not much else to do, she had a ridiculous amount of time to sit and think.

Every way she looked at it, no matter how she tried to reason around it, Aketaa could not come to any conclusion besides the fact that the Force is a truly neutral entity. How else could truly neutral organisms be connected to it? Living grass is neither Light nor Dark, Aketaa reasoned, it just exists. It is in the Force, and one can manipulate it as such, but it has no polarized aura to it. Therefore, the Force must be neutral, and the Light and Dark sides that practically the whole galaxy attribute to the Force itself must come from outward factors.

How, then, can one clearly sense a difference between what are called the Light and the Dark sides of the Force? How, then, are some fully drenched in the Light and some fully drowned in the Dark? This was something Aketaa could make neither head nor tail of. At the moment, her working theory was that people themselves polarized the Force. 

A firm knock on her door shook Aketaa out of her musings. Her bare feet made a soft slapping noise over the stone floor as she crossed her room to answer it. She sensed no danger; she had not sensed danger from any of these colonists since she first arrived and they were still suspicious of her. She did, however, sense a signature flutter of nerves that she knew well.

When Aketaa first arrived on Raydonia almost six years ago, she offered her services as a teacher of reading, writing, and mathematics in return for food and a place to stay. They let her have a one-room suite, part of a unit designed as an inn for travelers, and the village families took turns hosting her for lunches and dinners until she had learned how to cook a few common local meals. Her class at first ranged wildly in age from six to twenty-seven, and Aketaa found it intimidating to instruct people years older than she was on how to read and write Basic. Eventually, though, once her older students had learned all they had time to learn or all they had need of learning, her class dwindled down to just children. One older boy, a then-seventeen-year-old named Dom, stuck with the youngsters for a long time after everyone else his age had left. His family had hosted Aketaa often, and still extended her an invitation from time to time, so she was familiar enough with him to notice a shift in his demeanor. It was all too clear to her that the boy had developed a bad crush, and even six years later Aketaa still sensed his feelings for her as strong as ever, if not stronger.

“Dom, good afternoon,” she greeted. She could see his pulse pounding in his throat, poor boy. “What brings you here?”

“My mother’s makin’ a stew to celebrate our first field harvested,” he answered. “If you’d like to come for dinner, we’d be happy to have you this evenin’.” His anxiety spiked suddenly as he appeared to take a deep breath in preparation to say something else. “And I was wonderin’, if you haven’t had lunch yet, if you’d like to eat with me? I finished another book, and I thought we could talk about it.”

Dom was nothing if not sweet. He was always polite and got along well with the children in the village, and Aketaa wished he would spend less time pursuing her and more time with the young women his age who would be lucky to have him. In any case, she did enjoy the company of his family and she liked their book discussions. “I already ate, but you’re welcome to come in. We can talk about the book over tea.” Aketaa opened the door wider to let him in before leaving him to cross the threshold himself so she could put a kettle of water on the electric burner in the kitchenette. “I’ll come for stew, too. Anything your mother makes is always delicious.”

She heard him pull out one of her two chairs and have a seat, setting something on her table, probably his datapad. “What happened to your shoes?” he asked.

“Hm?”

“You’re in bare feet, I mean. Did something happen to your shoes?”

For a moment, Aketaa had forgotten her lack of shoes. Going barefoot at least in her own room had become quite natural to her. “I don’t wear shoes at home,” she answered. She paused, sensing his confusion but unsure of how to explain herself without mentioning the Force. No one here knew of her past or her gifts; that was a secret she had guarded close to her chest since Tatooine. “Growing up, I never wore shoes. My kind believes going barefoot keeps us more connected to the planet.” Vagueness never fails, especially when mixed with half-truths. Dom accepted this, and turned the conversation to his book.

Aketaa brought tea to the table with a quiet smile. As usual, his nerves calmed the longer he spent in her presence, even without a gentle soothing Force suggestion on her part. They discussed the themes and allegories of his book for a good amount of time before she interrupted to ask what time she should arrive at his family’s house for dinner, and then he said he should get back home to help his father. Dom thanked her for the tea and conversation before he left Aketaa alone with her thoughts once more.

She truly felt bad for the boy. Well, she mused, he wasn’t really a boy anymore, was he? Dom had just celebrated his twenty-second birthday recently; Aketaa supposed he qualified as a young man and had for a couple years now. Soon enough people would start wondering why he wasn’t interested in courting the very available young women his age. Aketaa herself often wondered why he didn’t just give up. Surely he realized she couldn’t give him what he wanted? His intentions were pure, but Aketaa almost preferred that they weren’t. Attachments were forbidden—…

Why, though? Forbiddance of personal attachment was one of the main conditions of the Jedi. They made one weak and susceptible to bribery and blackmail and selfishness. How could a Jedi be expected to choose duty over family or a lover if asked? Strong love corrupts and controls, just like hatred and pride and greed. This is why the Jedi left their families, had no husbands or wives or children, and kept friendships as impersonal as possible. Just like staunch adherence to the Light, this was another old Jedi custom, and hadn’t Master Skywalker told her to start anew? 

Was there an advantage to attachment that the Jedi overlooked? That was a question Aketaa had dealt with before when she was still a student of Master Skywalker’s academy. Perhaps if one aimed to uphold galactic peace, attachment might get in the way of prioritizing the greater good, and it could distract from peacekeeping and studying the Force and whatever else the Jedi used to do. But couldn’t attachment supply motivation? It could be a distraction and a weakness, maybe, but it could give one something to fight for, something to protect, something more tangible than abstract galactic peace. And anyway, maintaining galactic peace would be contradictory to balance, but that was a question for another time.

Regardless of whether or not attachment could be good, Aketaa still felt she couldn’t give what Dom wanted. He hoped to love her, provide for her, start a family with her, and grow old with her. He wanted a long, happy life with her, and Aketaa couldn’t commit to that. First of all, she simply didn’t see him in that way after being his teacher for the majority of her time here. Second, she felt wary of planning anything longterm on this planet; any day she might be discovered, especially with her new forays into Kylo Ren’s dreams. Third, children were extremely questionable at best biologically, considering she and Dom were two quite different species, and she had never heard of Togruta-human hybrids. Aketaa truly hoped that she wasn’t giving Dom false hope with their friendly interactions, but it would never work.

That evening, just before the sun set, she walked across the village to join her kind hosts for stew. Dinner with Dom’s family was delicious, of course, but Aketaa didn’t stay for too long. The nervous flutters only increased, never decreased like usual, and because of that she felt uneasy the entire time she was there.

—

“Ben, wait for me!”

He stood in a brilliant emerald forest illuminated by sunshine. Birds twittered high above, and leaves rustled with a summer breeze he couldn’t feel. Patches of blue sky peeked through the canopy of green overhead. It felt as if he’d been there before. He watched a white butterfly bob a path across the undergrowth, trying to place that feeling of familiarity, but then he caught sight of a blur of red-orange and white and navy barreling towards him. Alarmed, he tried to sidestep the runner but wasn’t fast enough—only for her to pass right through him as if he were made of mist. 

“Wait up!”

This time, he realized as he turned, she was much younger than she had appeared in previous dreams, only about ten years old. Her front headtails were barely long enough to bounce against her collarbones as she sprinted after who he assumed to be a younger version of himself. From behind, he recognized the tan robes of the Jedi students. 

She stopped quickly, skidding on the dirt. “Where’d you go?” she asked, young voice sounding so innocent and confused that he felt his heart clench. 

Movement caught his eye, and his attention was drawn towards a tall boy with a dark mop of hair creeping out from behind a tree as the young Togruta turned slowly in a circle, eyes squeezed shut in concentration. He recognized himself as a child, somewhere during his eleventh year judging by the length of his hair; just before his twelfth birthday his uncle had made him cut it. That made her nine. As he watched his younger self creep up on his friend, it dawned on him that they must’ve been playing a game to practice using Force shields. Often in their spare time they would play games such as this one to strengthen their abilities, he remembered.

“Gotcha!” young Ben shouted, grabbing her around her body, trapping both of her arms to her sides. He leaned back, lifting her feet off the ground and she yelped, startled, and kicked her legs in the air.

This was a memory. He remembered this. 

Her wild legs and squirming body were too much for his eleven-year-old frame, and he overcorrected. He watched the two children, able to pinpoint exactly when they both realized death was nigh by their synchronized looks of sudden dread. They fell backwards. They both screamed. Standing there as a fully mature adult, he winced at the high pitch of his childhood scream, and considering the fact that he clearly screamed higher than she did, he thought his wince was justified. Young Ben’s head smacked against the tree behind them, and it was off-center of the trunk enough to change their trajectory, falling sideways now on one side of the tree. She rolled away and onto her knees as soon as they hit the ground, while he rolled onto his front and groaned.

“Stars, are you okay?” she cried, walking on her knees towards his head. She sat back on her heels and looked through his hair at the back of his head. Young Ben went very still as her fingers combed through his hair, parting it in different spots. “It doesn’t look like you’re bleeding,” she mused. “I guess your stupid hair saved you.”

This couldn’t be his own memory, could it? There was no way he could’ve remembered all the faces she made, both while they were still playing and now as she moved his hair to look at the back of his neck. And surely if it were his own memory he would be watching it from his point of view, or at least with himself as the focus; instead she seemed to be the main character as the events unfolded. If it were his own memory, surely his emotions at the time would’ve been more apparent than simply laying still. Could this be not his memory, but her memory of the same event? Could she be reaching out to him?

She hesitated and bit her gray lower lip for a brief moment, betraying nervousness he never sensed, before ducking her head quickly to plant a kiss on the back of young Ben’s head. “I think you’re okay,” she announced.

He smiled, even as the memory began to dissolve around him. Later, he would vomit on her as they made their way back to his—back to Skywalker. He got a concussion and a crush that day, and even after all these years he realized he couldn’t regret either.

His last thought before everything faded to the darkness of deeper sleep was that if he truly just witnessed her memory, it must have been projected from somewhere.

—

Far across the galaxy from Kylo Ren, Aketaa returned to herself in a panic. Showing him her memory was a mistake. She had thought it would be innocuous enough: a small, shared event that was so long ago that he likely wouldn’t notice any odd details that might identify the scene as one from her mind and not his. It was far too overconfident a move. Now because of her slip, Kylo Ren was suspicious. Aketaa doubted that he would wave the whole thing away as just another dream of his own.

In her head, she began to formulate a list of everything she would need to pack, which wasn’t much, and everyone she would need to tell of her departure. What explanation could she give? “I know I’ve been teaching your sons and daughters for the past six years, but I’m actually a fugitive Force-sensitive in hiding from Commander Kylo Ren of the First Order, only recently my old Jedi Master died and left it to me to find a new way of relating to the Force and to turn Kylo Ren away from the Dark side if necessary and possible. I’ve been visiting his dreams for months now and because of that I have endangered this entire planet with my presence, so I plan to leave as soon as possible.” No, that would be ridiculous. No one would believe her, and if they did, she refused to give them any cause to worry or rally for her sake. 

She had just begun to stack her clothes on the table when she felt Dom’s presence outside her door. He knocked a moment later. Aketaa sighed but called for him to come in anyway.

“Good mornin’. W-what are you doin’?” His usual nerves became true worry as he surveyed the datapads and folded clothes and shoes and even her lightsaber on the table—her lightsaber, kriff, her lightsaber. “Are you goin’ somewhere?” he asked slowly, watching her dig under the bed for the collapsible crate she had originally brought her things in all those years ago. 

She chose not to answer, instead crouching on the floor to pop the crate into its full shape. Most of her concentration was dedicated to reigning in the boiling terror in her mind and locking her entire being under the strongest, thickest shields she could muster. Only a small corner of her attention monitored Dom and his emotions as he stepped up to her table, his hurt confusion and blooming awe. Surely he recognized what the robes she never wore but saved meant, what the metal hilt she never used but kept meant...but it didn’t matter now, not when she had to leave before the First Order tracked her down and came searching for her.

“Is that—are these yours?” he asked, voice hushed. Metal scraped against the wooden table. “Is this a—a lightsaber?”

Dom’s whispered reverence might’ve embarrassed and humbled Aketaa in any other situation, but her life was about to crumble around her and he was realizing that someone he had known half a decade had lied to his entire village the whole time. She stood to transfer what few things she truly owned into the crate, gaze resolutely focused on her hands. A touch on her shoulder, brushing her damaged front lek, froze her. Aketaa bit her lip, hands shaking, and looked up.

“You’re cryin’,” was all he said.

She hadn’t even realized. When she lifted a hand to her cheek, it was wet with tears; she wiped them away with a rough brush of her fingers. 

Dom hesitated before setting the lightsaber hilt back down on the table and gently guiding her to sit in a chair. For a moment, he seemed caught between kneeling before her and pulling the other chair over. He settled in the middle and did neither, standing over her rather unhelpfully. He offered her a handkerchief to wipe her tears with, and he waited until she had taken a few calming breaths to collect herself before launching into all of his questions.

“Are you a Jedi? I thought the Jedi were extinct? Why did you hide it? Why did you come here in the first place? Why do you have to go? Did we do somethin’ to upset you? Is it the Resistance?”

He would’ve continued forever if Aketaa hadn’t flicked her eyes up to him, piercing him with a glare more fierce than she had given in a long time. With an audible click of his teeth, Dom shut his mouth, but he still looked at her expectantly. Aketaa took another round of deep breaths, willing some of the calm she could always find in meditation to wash over her now.

“The saber is mine, yes,” she began, voice rough, “but I’m not a Jedi. I was almost a Jedi, once, long ago, but there was—there was an incident, and now the Jedi are truly gone. I barely escaped, and I was only a student. I fled, and I hid first on Tatooine, then on Akiva, trying to bury my presence as deep as I could, but I didn’t feel safe enough until I came here. I thought this was remote enough that I would never be found, especially if I kept every part of my Force sensitivity a secret. It worked, I think. That is, it did until my old master found me and contacted me and told me to reach out again, and so I did,” she continued, feeling the panic mounting in her stomach and rising to her chest again, “and it was okay until I tried too much too soon and now he knows I’m the one reaching out and he’ll find me and I have to leave before he can find me and follow me here and destroy the entire planet trying to destroy me.” 

She was crying again, and shaking, and now Dom did kneel before her chair to rub his hands over her arms. “It’s okay, don’t worry,” he said, trying to soothe, but his growing fear washed over Aketaa like a rising flood. “We can tell the mayor, and he can contact the other villages to put them on alert—“

“No!” she yelped, catching his elbow. “The fewer people who know, the better. I shouldn’t have even told you; you’re in danger now too.”

“Don’t worry about me, I’m sure everyone would want to help you too.”

“No one else can know,” she said, tone firm, and stood to resume packing her things.

“Aketaa, please—“

“No, Dom! Your knowing puts the planet in enough danger as it is.”

“Then if you’re escapin’, let me come with you! We’ll—we’ll hide together.”

Aketaa froze in the middle of insulating a data pad between the folds of her packed clothes. There was no way she could leave him here, knowing as much of her story as he did, and there was no way she could take him. He was a liability in both cases. Another option, a third option, came to Aketaa like a lightning bolt. She didn’t like it, but she knew it was the only way to protect the village and protect herself. 

Trust the Force, Master Skywalker had said. Trust the Force.

Swallowing a lump in her throat, Aketaa turned to Dom. The hope and trust in his eyes and radiating from him made her falter, but she had to do this. There was no way around it. She lifted her hand.

“You will forget all you have heard and seen today in this room,” she commanded.

He blinked once, twice, before his face smoothed into a peaceful daze. “I will forget all I have heard and seen today in this room,” he repeated.

She took another deep breath. “You will sleep now,” she added.

“I will—“

His eyes were shut and his body was falling before he even finished the sentence. Aketaa rushed the catch his limp form, hefting him in her arms with some difficulty. She deposited him on the bed and hurried to finish her preparations to leave. Her last action before sealing the crate was to fill the extra space with her stockpiled credits; they would have to support her until she could get somewhere safe—or at least safer—and find some means to an income. Just before she left, she brushed Dom’s mind with the Force, rousing him gently.

“W-what happened?” he groaned, sitting up.

“You passed out all of a sudden in the middle of our conversation,” she answered, careful to hide any outward signs of turmoil.

Dom raised a hand to his head. “What conversation?”

“I was telling you about my aunt on Shili, don’t you remember?”

He eyed her packed crate and traveling coat. “Is that where you’re goin’?”

“I told you it was. Are you alright?”

He was quiet a moment, his brow creased in confusion. “I’m...yeah, I’m okay, I think.”

“Okay. I need to wrap things up with the innkeeper about my ship, or otherwise I’d stay. You should head home and rest. It must be the harvest work tiring you out,” she said, using just a little Force suggestion so that he’d comply and go straight home.

It pained her to leave the way she needed to. The innkeeper had always been kind to her, letting her occupy her room and stowing her ship on the condition that she teach his young daughters, no monetary payment necessary. Now she approached with credits in hand, prepared to ask that he fill her ship’s fuel reserves completely, but he only smiled and told her to keep her money. At his question, Aketaa gave him the same story she had just given Dom: she needed to visit her aunt on Shili, her homeworld, and it was an emergency. The innkeeper promised to let the village know her reasons for taking off so quickly and wished her and her fictitious aunt well as Aketaa boarded her ship, crate in her arms.

“I don’t know how long I’ll be gone or if I can return,” she said, thankful that this was the only goodbye she would need to make. Her throat felt thick with emotion.

The innkeeper smiled his gentle smile. “I’ll have a room open for you if you do,” he said with a wink. 

She watched him wave her off as she rose through the air until she couldn’t see him anymore. With a deep, stabilizing breath, she reminded herself that she was leaving to protect them, and pushed her ship faster to break atmo. The sooner she entered hyperspace, the better—but where could she go?

Before, when she was scared and alone and had nowhere to go, Aketaa had gone to Tatooine. Mos Eisley, she had heard long, long ago, was a slimy pit of scum from all over the galaxy, bounty hunters and gangsters and fugitives alike. It was both a fantastic and terrible place to hide. If a warrant was out for your head, a city full of bounty hunters was the absolute last place you should go. If all you wanted was to maintain your anonymity, it was such a big and diverse city that nothing was out of place and very few things were suspicious. It had been as good a place as any for Aketaa to get her bearings on her own and look into long-term hiding solutions. She had managed it once; she could manage it again.

With her mind made up, Aketaa powered up the hyperdrive as she punched in the coordinates for Tatooine. At a safe distance from Raydonia, she made the jump into hyperspace and then collapsed back into the pilot’s seat, exhausted. Now she could rest—above all, she could relax.

Hours later, after a long meditation, where instead of grounding herself to the universe around her, she turned inward to unravel the knot of fear and worry in her gut, the ship came out of hyperspace with Tatooine in sight. There didn’t appear to be any sort of blockade around the planet, and Aketaa sensed no obvious dangerous presence. She piloted the ship into the planet’s orbit, content to float for a moment while she steadied herself and locked down her mental shield even tighter. It was another few minutes before she would be close enough to Mos Eisley for her to feel comfortable entering atmo.

When she finally approached the city, heading for the passenger ship docks, Aketaa probed around the city, feeling people of all sorts, dangerous, nasty, untrustworthy, and wary people, but none who posed any danger specifically to her. She labeled herself as a traveler just passing through and paid to store her ship for this day and the next. Early mornings in Mos Eisley were quiet; the drunks already staggered home and the vendors were just preparing to open their stalls for the day, and Aketaa could move relatively safely through the dirty streets. Before the day was out, she hoped to have some idea of where to go next.

—

Rasping breath echoed in his ears, too loud, interrupting his meditation. There was a phantom pain on the right side of his head, near his ear, and his right shoulder burned as if he had been shot. Over the breathing, the sound of an entrance ramp lowering—all he could see was the red glow of light behind closed eyelids. People chattering, large animals and speeders and carts moving, all of it was loud, louder than he was used to, and too echoey, as if he were listening through pipes. Someone with a gruff voice asked if he was alright, and his eyes were still closed, but he felt his head give a sharp nod, and then finally he could see.

Everything was a shade of orange-tan, as if the whole structure he stood in was build out of sand. He handed credits to someone in his peripheral vision before staggering down the ramp. There was an odd extra weight around his head, and it moved as he did, swinging to follow his head—the weight on his right side felt unbalanced, and that phantom pain was enough to make him want to crumple to the ground, but his body walked on. He became aware that his center of gravity was wrong and his point of view looked too short to be correct. This was someone else’s body, and he was merely looking through its eyes.

The world seemed to blur, and then he was in a bar, still that awful sand color. The teal-skinned Twi’lek barmaid mentioned bacta and rest before he felt an odd touch to that phantom weight around his head that sent a shiver down his spine before the body went very still.

“What’s a pretty little exotic thing like you doing here?” came the slimy voice of some sleazy figure behind him.

Before he even comprehended what the man had said, the body he was stuck in jumped up and whirled around to grab the sleemo and pin him against the bar with his arm twisted behind his back. He thought he actually heard himself hiss as he pressed the man into the edge of the bar. This body’s arms were red-orange.

“Kriff, alright, get off, I’m sorry!” the man coughed. After he was released, he limped away with a mean but defeated look, and the body sat back on what he assumed was a bar stool. The Twi’lek only had one tattooed eyebrow raised to indicate any reaction, as if she was annoyed their conversation had been interrupted, nothing more.

Everything went blurry and cleared again when he was somehow in a darkened—but still sandy—room with the Twi’lek. The pain of before had become just the dull, aching itch of a bacta-treated wound on both his head and his shoulder, but that was less interesting than the fact that he was staring right into the Twi’lek’s sultry violet eyes, wishing he could tell who it was reflected back to him. His only warning was the Twi’lek’s parting lips before she pounced, kissing the body he was still trapped in. He was glad the eyes slid shut again; this felt like a distinctly private moment that he perhaps should not see, even if he wanted to. Shut eyes did nothing to lessen the sensations the body was experiencing, however, and he felt almost disappointed when the backs of the eyelids blurred and all feeling faded away.

From the rest of the snippets of what he was certain were memories projected by accident, he gathered that whoever owned the eyes he looked through lived in that sandy horror city for an extended amount of time, living with that teal Twi’lek and maintaining a sexual relationship with her. The body worked behind the bar and worked between the sheets, selling itself to bar patrons who were only too willing to pay. Some encounters were good, and some encounters were not, but the resulting credits were carefully counted and saved, though he couldn’t figure out what for.

The body stiffened when a squadron of off-duty Stormtroopers walked into the bar. He only saw flashes here and there—the body was too nervous or afraid to remember everything that happened—but somehow the encounter ended with a blaster in his face and a jade lightsaber held in a defensive block in a red-orange grip.

All senses cut out completely, leaving him in a black void. What he had just seen was unmistakable. He remembered that lightsaber, knew its owner, was all too familiar with the owner’s red-orange skin. And he was all too familiar with her injury. 

“Why did you show me this?” he called out. He could feel mortification blossoming around him, but she was nowhere to be seen, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t sense any indication that she was actually there. And then there was a whisper, just a faint brush against his being.

“You weren’t supposed to see it,” the whisper told him, and then it was gone.

—

She had dozed off in the cockpit. It would be another three and a half hours yet before her ship would come out of hyperspace, so no real damage was done, but she hadn’t intended to let her memories of her first stay on Tatooine reach Kylo Ren. It wouldn’t change anything, she hoped—he would understand the memory was years old, and in case he decided to investigate the desert planet anyway, she was already lightyears away. Regardless of the fact that it was nothing serious, and he hadn’t gotten past any of her shields, Aketaa was still upset. Ryla herself would always be a fond memory and a trusted friend; in fact, Aketaa had sought her out for advice and comfort as soon as she was able, and was relieved to find the Twi’lek still alive and well, running the same bar she had seven years ago. That didn’t mean she wanted anyone to be that well-acquainted with her activities in Mos Eisley, especially not Kylo Ren.

How had it even happened? Was her mind so used to reaching for Kylo’s that she did it in her sleep? That was certainly a frightening thought. Hopefully he wouldn’t find a way to exploit the connection she could so easily make.

A thought occurred to her, and it made her lips twitch into a smile. At least he had felt the pain of what he’d done to her. Aketaa reached up to finger the rough, puckered end of her severed lek at her waist, sighing at the old injury, the permanent reminder of the night she thought she had lost Ben Solo forever. It was bitter and maybe a little cruel of her to gain satisfaction from knowing he suffered as she had, but it was only in passing. So long as she forgave him—and she had—a little anger was alright. She was grateful he only took the tip of her lek and not her life.

Aketaa tried to pass the time by meditating, but her concentration was still shaken. Not only did her memories of Mos Eisley cling to the forefront of her mind, her plan going forward worried her. With Ryla there providing her practical, no-nonsense opinion, Aketaa worked out a new Outer Rim planet, even more remote than Raydonia and even less populated by civilized peoples, to hide on until she was ready to let her mental shields down. Hopefully by then Aketaa would’ve been able to neutralize Kylo Ren’s anger and hatred or at least open his mind to a less dangerous path. If she could face him in person, maybe she could talk him down from his hunger for power. In any case, she needed to be sure he would come alone before she let him find her.

The distance between Tatooine and this new planet was greater than what a single jump in hyperspace could span in her small ship. Aketaa would need to make three jumps, the first two as long as her ship could handle and the last a little less than half that. This was the second jump, and as it neared completion, so too Aketaa neared her new home for Force knew how long. The planet’s name was lost to most modern maps, though apparently most ancient sources named it Echara, and Aketaa still wasn’t sure how Ryla found it; she hadn’t questioned her methods before, and she wasn’t about to this time. All she knew was that it was supposed to be lush and beautiful, orbiting close around a weak star.

But what if Aketaa failed? What if Kylo Ren was too far gone to ever return to Ben Solo? What if he was irredeemable, too entrenched in the Dark side to ever leave it?

There lied the deeper problem: was there a Dark side to save him from? Was there a Light side and a Dark side, truly? Aketaa wasn’t sure her earlier conclusion that the Force itself was neutral was correct. She had sensed herself many times a difference between Dark and Light. Perhaps the only mistake made by Jedi and Sith alike is seeing the two sides as black and white, two extremes, and one must choose an extreme to strive towards. She had heard of Gray Jedi before, and neutral Force-users; they were part of why she had thought the Force might be neutral in the first place. But wasn’t it possible that some areas of the Force were Light, some Dark, and some firmly neither? Like life and death, both must exist in balance. Without death, there can be no room for new life, and without life, there can be no death. Just like shadows, the Dark needs the Light to exist, and without the Dark, the Light has no meaning. Aketaa only needed to show Kylo this truth, this balance, and hope that he would see the sense in it. If she could just show him that the question of Light or Dark is a false dilemma, maybe she could convince him to leave the path of the Dark side. Master Skywalker had said himself that bringing Kylo to the Light may be impossible.

An alert sounded, shaking Aketaa from her musings: this jump was nearly over. She checked the fuel reserves, and it looked like the ship would have just enough fuel to make it to her destination with a little extra. Hopefully the extra would be enough to get to a planet she could properly refuel at whenever she decided to leave. Aketaa came out of hyperspace and let the ship float for just a moment as she punched in her final coordinates and powered the hyperdrive up one last time.

—

“These visits of yours are happening more often. This is the third one in a week after three spaced out over more than half a year.”

She had given up on appearing to him the way he remembered her. The woman that stood before him was her, there was no doubt about it: her facial markings hadn’t changed, her skin was the same bright hue, and her eyes still held kind warmth in their golden depths. The difference was in the way she carried herself, the length and thickness of her headtails, the curve of her horns, and the seriousness with which she looked at him.

“After the last few, I assumed my game was up. I’ll stop masquerading as a figment of your own subconsciousness if you agree to discuss something with me maturely.”

“You want to talk about the Force? About how you sense Light in me? Do you think you can redeem me too?” he mocked.

“No,” she said, with a small shake of her head.

“What, then? Are you here to join me? Rey rejected my offer of galactic power, but I know you’re strong too.”

“I won’t join you, either. Haven’t you paid attention?” she sighed.

“You showed me salvation and nostalgia. You can’t turn back time, and the heroism of the Light side is all a farce, Aketaa. With my strength and your insight—“

“I’m not trying to lure you to the Light, you nerf herder. And I certainly won’t join you, for the last time.”

“Then why are you here?” he hissed. “I’m not even sure where ‘here’ is. We’re just in the middle of nothingness,” he said, indicating the void around them. “Why can’t you pick an actual location to corner me in?”

“It takes a lot of energy to generate a setting,” she snapped. “It’s easy when you already dream of yourself in a place; you can’t expect me to do everything.”

“I at least expect you to reveal your intentions.”

She sighed again and sat down, crossing her legs. There wasn’t even anything to sit on, but he supposed if she were going to sit down, he might as well take advantage of standing much taller. He crossed the space between them as if he walking on solid ground that didn’t exist to tower over her. She rolled her eyes at him. He crossed his arms and glowered.

“Why don’t you tell me about this Rey person? You said she rejected you?”

“I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“Ah, so you’re in love with her.”

“I—no, I’m not. We just…we understood each other.”

She nodded. “And so you thought she would want power like you.”

He only scowled.

“Is she a Jedi?”

“Yes.”

Out of all the reactions she could have displayed, chuckling was not one he had expected. “What a story of star-crossed lovers, indeed,” she laughed. “You connected and felt each other’s pain, and fell in love, but you each pledged yourselves to opposite, warring causes, is that it?”

“You’re mocking me,” he growled, anger bubbling in his chest. 

She sobered quickly, composing herself again in her seated position. “I’m sorry,” she said, “forgive me. Tell me, what circumstances let you grow to know her well enough to sympathize with her?”

How could he ever explain? Why should he explain? She had no right to know. “My master bridged a unique Force bond between us, and at random moments we could see each other as if the other was physically there,” he said. So much for maintaining his privacy.

She frowned. “Interesting. When you offered her power, was this through one of those moments?”

“No, she had come to me in person, thinking she could seduce me to the Light. I brought her to my master, who revealed his whole plot. When he asked me to kill her, I killed him instead.”

“And you fought together so well you thought she would want to fight by your side for the rest of your days.”

“At the time, it seemed like a good idea.” He found himself sitting on nothing at all, mimicking her position. “I see now it was folly. She never wanted me, only who she thought I could become if I joined her in the Light.”

She hummed. “Love was so much simpler as a child,” she whispered, not quite looking at him, but rather looking through him. “No expectations.”

“You speak from experience.” It was a statement, not an assumption. Her memories of that sandy hellscape were seared on the backs of his eyelids. He tried not to consider it; acknowledging the jealousy he felt would mean acknowledging his past, and he refused to do so.

She nodded. “I never told her I fell in love with her. I got over it after I left, and she’ll still never know.” She shrugged. “It’s better that way. I couldn’t stay there living the way I was, like she would’ve expected, and you can’t be who you used to be, like Rey expected.”

“Yes.”

They sat in quiet commiseration; he didn’t know how long. He studied his hands in his lap, considering his feelings for Rey. Did he love her? He loved her power, he was drawn to her strength of spirit, he could relate to her unfortunate past, and he wanted her body, but did he love Rey, the person, or did he love Rey, the idea?

It was some time before he looked up and realized he was alone, and she was no longer sitting quietly across from him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> quick note for this chap: Kylo forces a mental connection, causes Aketaa physical pain in the present.

Echara was gorgeous. Everywhere she looked, at least where she landed, blue-green trees grew thick with needle-like leaves and tall trunks, the forest floor carpeted with blue grass and decaying needle leaves. Even in bare feet, the ground was soft, and it took no effort to move soundlessly. A crisp breeze moved the trees and froze the inside of her nose, smelling sharp and sweet. During her descent, Aketaa saw mountains nearby, and she hoped to find them while exploring the place. Small fuzzy creatures with eight webbed legs and long tails moved through the trees, jumping and gliding from branch to branch, tree to tree. They chittered to each other, unafraid of Aketaa and her ship. They must have few predators here, which was good news for her. Just as Ryla had promised, no signs of civilization were to be found anywhere, at least not without looking closer than she wanted to right then.

At the moment, her easiest living solution was to power her ship completely down with the entrance ramp down. She had established a sort of fire pit near the entrance within the first day on Echara, and she had enough food rations to figure out what here she could eat and what she couldn’t. So far the fuzzy, leaping creatures were a no; they moved too fast for Aketaa to catch unless she found a different method, and they seemed like they had very little meat on their bones anyway. She hoped she would find some sort of ground-dwelling animal with more substance than the leapers. Interestingly, the only avian life she could hear sang at night, but she hadn’t seen any of the birds yet—or at least she thought they were birds.

On her second night on Echara, Aketaa reached out to feel Kylo in meditation, and seized the opportunity. Now that she needed to stretch even farther to contact him, all of her energy went into simply sustaining her presence in his mind. She couldn’t appear with an illusion of youth anymore, and she couldn’t even consider creating some sort of space to house their meeting in, not if she wanted to stay as long as she did. Despite that, Aketaa found him surprisingly receptive to her. He never tried to force her out, and he was quite willing to discuss Rey, the student Master Skywalker mentioned. Perhaps she was already a common subject of his consideration, and so she was easy to talk about in his head.

While the encounter gave her hope that he would refrain from being overly aggressive to her, Aketaa held no expectation that reasoning with him would be simple. Additionally, she would have to avoid making him too curious about her own whereabouts; even though her shields were tight and his sensing her had failed before, if she kept initiating contact frequently he might be able to trace the direction of her probing. Having established that he could at least be spoken with like a person, Aketaa decided to dedicate important time to establishing herself on this planet, laying low in the Force for the time being.

Water was a priority. The morning after her conversation with Kylo Ren, Aketaa clipped her long-dormant lightsaber to her belt, threw on another layer against the chill of the breeze, and set out to find a lake or river or something. The land sloped downward to the west—she’d made note of the direction of the sunset in relation to her ship the past two nights—and instinct told her water would be downhill if anywhere. It wasn’t long before she picked up the sound of moving fluid, and corrected her course to follow it. Before she reached what she assumed was a mountain spring, she reached a wide lake reflecting the sun up at her eyes through the trees. 

It was beautiful, clear and calm. She brought the chemical safety testing equipment out of her pack, hoping it wasn’t old enough to be unreliable. Crouching down at the lake’s edge, Aketaa dipped the long probe into the water, keeping her eyes on the screen as readout graphs slowly loaded. The lake seemed to be made of mostly pure water. There were low concentrations of some common minerals, all at safe levels, and about the usual biotic life one would expect in a natural lake, but no toxins. She would need to treat the water to avoid ingesting parasites or harmful bacteria, but otherwise her first priority was fulfilled.

As Aketaa was packing up the testing equipment, she felt the tiniest little tap against her mental shields. It was next to nothing, but it was enough to worry her. Her protections were strong, and she knew she was still undetected, but someone was looking for her, someone who knew her well enough that they had reached out to where she would have been in their network many years ago. Kylo had started looking for her.

It felt good, for a moment, to know that she might be missed, but that moment passed in an instant. Whatever they had had as children was long gone; Kylo had seen to that when he cut her out of his life just as he cut off her lek, without a thought for what they had experienced together and without any regrets. Aketaa never expected for a minute that reconnecting with Kylo would lead to rekindling their old relationship, though she couldn’t say she hadn’t hoped once or twice that he would still find her desirable. Perhaps it was vanity more than a true yearning for lost love. No, she was glad to be beyond the prospects of romance with that man and all his jealousy, insecurity, and angry violence. Even when they were teenagers, the deeper he fell into the Dark, the worse he became in his demeanor to the point where she had begun to fear being alone with him. In some ways, it was a blessing that he had razed their lives to the ground.

She waited for weeks, counting the days with tick marks on the walls of her ship. After almost a month, she had only felt him reaching for her one more time, and she believed her shields were as strong as ever. Resisting the urge to hold her breath, she reached out.

—

He was treading water, or trying to tread water. The waves and rain came down on his head without mercy, and the thick fabric of his clothing was waterlogged and heavy, dragging him down. His fingers and toes were numb, and his limbs started to feel weak. His head sank below the water.

“Ben,” he heard, as he tried to fight his way back up to air. “Ben, stop struggling.”

Lungs burning, he looked around for her. She was standing on the sandy bottom, algae floating serenely around her legs, swaying in synchrony with her long headtails, one blunt-ended and shorter than the other. Looking into her eyes, he forgot the storm above the water.

Her gray lips pulled into a gentle smile. “Isn’t it peaceful down here?” she asked. “Come, talk with me.” She extended her arm, offering her hand.

He kicked his legs, reaching for her. The edges of his vision started to darken, his head beginning to fill with static. She bent her legs to push off the seabed—was it the sea? or a lake? he didn’t know—and closed the distance between them, gripping his wrist and sinking with him slowly back down. When he felt his feet hit the bottom through his boots, she smiled again at him. A cloud of sand rose up through the algae, most settling again, some getting swept up and away by the current.

The waves on the surface scattered light in quick patterns across her face, illuminating the concerned tilt of her white brow markings. “Stop holding your breath,” she commanded. “You’ll make yourself pass out.”

He shook his head, terrified of feeling the water fill his mouth, nose, and lungs, taking over his defenses because he was too weak to hold out against it.

“This is your dream,” she reminded him. “You can breathe underwater if you want to.” Kicking up small clouds of sand as she walked, she came closer to him, close enough to skate her hand from his wrist up to his shoulder. “Relax. You’re so tense.”

Before he realized she was moving again, he felt her hand on his scarred cheek, blessing him with the softest of caresses. In his shock at the sensation of her skin on his, he gasped, and it was over. His last breath bubbled out of his mouth as water rushed in, stinging his throat and settling heavy in his lungs. Panic washed over him, speeding his heart to a rapid rate pounding in his ears, but there was no pain as his body lost its precious air, and her thumb smoothed over his cheekbone, soothing him, prompting him to take a calming breath. 

“Good,” she said. “Well done.” She waited as he breathed, his heart slowing, the adrenaline ebbing. Then she shifted her hands down to his upper arms and said, “Let’s talk.”

They settled on the sand, sitting across from each other, like they had the last time she appeared. This time, he didn’t bother asking her to join him; he had already exhausted that argument, and he knew he would never win her over to the Dark side. This time, he wanted to get a straight answer out of her, without letting her beat around the bush. This time, he asked, “Why are you reaching out to me?”

“Have you had any more Force connections with Rey?”

He had, actually. There was that time when she escaped the salt planet with her precious shambles of a Resistance, when she slammed the button to close the entrance ramp of the Falcom as if she were slamming a door in his face. Then there was the time when she had clearly been in the middle of something important, strategic discussions, he assumed, and she had pretended she couldn’t see or hear him. One time he had been in the middle of a meal, and he embarrassingly spilled soup all over himself. 

“Yes, on multiple occasions,” he answered. The downside of meeting Aketaa in his mind was that he could not seem to lie to her.

“You’ve wondered, I assume, why these connections still occur after Snoke’s death?”

“Of course I have,” he snapped.

She nodded, headtails drifting around her shoulders. “You’re being defensive. You’re connecting the dots.”

“And you’re avoiding my original question.” He stood, impatience reaching critical levels. “Why are you here?”

For a beat, she just looked up at him, yellow eyes flashing irregularly as they reflected the surface light filtering in through the waves. “I never finished my Jedi training; you saw to that. For seven, almost eight years, I’ve lived my life apart from what teachings I had learned, hiding that part of me so completely that no one would ever suspect it was there. It gave me perspective, like Snoke gave you perspective, but instead of switching sides I don’t think I’ll ever take a side again. This isn’t about the Resistance, and this isn’t about the First Order, Ben; this is about the Force, and I don’t think it was ever right to take one side to begin with. 

“I tried to make you think about the pain the Dark side inflicts on you and everyone around you. I tried to show you the innocence we once had, before we were concerned with Light or Dark. I’m trying to make you think about Rey. She has the knowledge of a youngling when it comes to the Force, and she has no one to indoctrinate her in either dogma, only the politics of the Resistance. What will she become without the old Jedi teachings? What am I becoming? What is the Force? That’s what this is about,” she finished.

His hands had clenched into fists as she said these things, and now he grit his teeth, scowling down at her. He had suspected she had been trying to manipulate him since the beginning, and he was right, though he wasn’t entirely sure what to make of her ideas. She didn’t say explicitly that she wanted to turn him from the Dark side, but she heavily implied it, that was certain; what was she trying to convert him to, though? He didn’t know. In the absence of a better response, he gave her angry words.

“Snake,” he accused through clenched teeth. “I have been honest with you, and you refuse to give me a straight answer. You told me nothing!”

“The tides are turning,” she said, a stern force behind her tone. She stood to match his posture, though her eye level was no higher than his chin. “I’m telling you that you need to think. Think about your adolescence and your conflict and your Darkness and your Lightness and the universe itself. The world isn’t black and white like they told us it is, and it’s time you start understanding that.”

With that, her form dissolved, swirling into nothingness in the water. She took all sense of safety with her, and he was drowning once again.

—

After two and a half months, the relief in solitude was beginning to wear off. Aketaa hadn’t found any native people with sentience, only a myriad of animals. She had at least figured out that there were plump little ground-dwelling creatures about the length of her forearm with eight little feet and a stubby little tail that could be easily hunted, skinned, and cooked. The meat was sweet and tender, juicy with fat, and one of these animals made a perfect stew that could last her two or three days when she added to it the starchy tubers she discovered by observing the very same animals. Other than the ground-dwellers and the tree-swingers, she had noted a handful of different insects, none of which troubled her, and a much smaller eight-legged critter that was no bigger than her fist and lived in little burrows among the tree roots. Nowhere could Aketaa find any sign that a sentient, civilized population had ever existed on Echara. 

She developed a habit of talking to herself and the things around her by the end of her third month. There was no other way to maintain her sanity, isolated as she was. Now and then she’d make casual conversation with the burrowers when they came to poke their curious snouts around her campsite, or she’d ask the trees rhetorical questions. She started thanking the lake when she visited to collect water, and sincerely apologizing to the ground-dwellers she hunted.

“I know if I talked to Kylo often, then I probably wouldn’t be talking to you right now,” she told the little ball of fluff that was currently climbing up the side of a crate she had brought out of the ship. “It’s just risky to contact him so many times. If he grows too familiar with the feeling of my visits, no matter how well I hide my signature, he might be able to feel out the direction I’m coming from. I can’t let that happen, obviously. There’s no guarantee he won’t track me down and kill me just to be rid of me.” She sighed and rubber a hand over the juncture between her montrals. “You don’t care, of course. Stars, you don’t even understand a thing I’m saying.”

To help herself and keep her mind sharp, Aketaa decided she would write out all her musings on the Force and its nature. Perhaps it would break the habit of speaking to things that could never speak back in addition to ordering her nebulous thoughts. There was a mobile solar generator unit tucked away in a storage compartment of her ship, so Aketaa brought it outside and charged up a datapad where she could type up document after document. This endeavor of hers took up plenty of time, and it felt as if she was being depressurized as she translated her thoughts into concrete words.

The singing still happened every night, and Aketaa still couldn’t tell what it was. Being a Togruta, her eyes were well-suited for seeing in the dark, but there were no birds she could find in the trees whenever she tried to look. Anyway, the singing sounded far-away, so maybe she couldn’t find its origins because they simply weren’t there around her. At least, that’s how it was for a long while, until one evening just days after Aketaa began to notice a seasonal change taking place around her. She woke up to frost two mornings in a row, and the foliage had begun to look a few shades darker blue than the aqua color she had grown used to. 

That evening, just after a beautiful purple sunset, the singing started up as it always did, melodious and smooth and distant, until suddenly it became shrill and sharp for a few moments before it stopped altogether. When it started again hours later, the sound seemed to come from a different direction. Aketaa hadn’t even realized the sound had a direction until she knew the source must have moved to a new place. Something had attacked the singers, Aketaa thought, and made them move to a new singing ground. This was the first evidence she had of a predator-prey dynamic on the peaceful planet. She hoped that whatever hunted the singers was too small or too afraid to hunt her, too. After listening to the singers for a while longer, Aketaa went into her ship to go to sleep for the night.

In the morning, she rose and came out of the ship, bare feet banging down the metal ramp for a few steps before a sound made her freeze. A whimpering? Yes, something was hiding under her ship, and she had frightened it. Aketaa proceeded with more caution, using a light step to walk down the rest of the ramp and making slow movements to come around the side of it. She crouched and ducked her head to have a look. Curled up under the ramp, in the most protected place it could find, was a very leggy, long-necked little animal. In the shadow of the ship and in the weak morning light, Aketaa thought it looked very similar in color to the blue Echaran grass. She used a gentle Force suggestion to calm the animal and reached out for it, being careful not to bang her montrals against the edge of the metal ramp. With some coaxing, she brought the creature out into the light. It protested with a clear, melodic sound, and Aketaa realized this was one of the singing animals.

It was nocturnal. She could feel its weariness and see the reflective backing in its silvery eyes. She picked it up, cradled it in her arms, and carried it into her ship to give it a safe and warm place to rest. Not for the first time, Aketaa cursed her remote isolation; she had no idea if this animal was a youngling or an adult, how to tell if it was male or female or neither, or what the dietary and behavioral needs of its species were. As she went back outside, having settled the creature in a nest of blankets and spare clothes, she tried to develop a guess as to how it ended up in her camp. Maybe the singers were pack creatures, and this one was separated from the pack during what Aketaa was pretty sure was an attack last night. It ran in one direction, and its pack ran in another. Maybe the entire pack scattered. Should she be using the word “pack”? This animal didn’t seem like a predator—its eyes were positioned on the sides of its head, a common feature of prey animals across many planets, especially when Aketaa compared it to the tree-swingers, whose eyes were front-facing, and the ground-dwellers and burrowers, whose eyes were side-facing. Wasn’t “pack” a predator term? Togruta were pack creatures, though the polite term was “a tribal people.” Togruta were also without a doubt predators. Perhaps “herd” was a better fit.

She roused the ashes and coals back to smoldering so she could reheat yesterday’s stew. A chill blew through the forest, rustling the soft needle-leaved trees. As soon as the pot felt hot, Aketaa brough her breakfast back inside the ship, where it was warmer. Finding the little singer asleep, she settled down next to it with a spoon.

“You and me, huh?” she said quietly so as not to disturb the creature. “Two animals separated from our packs. Or herds. Let’s just call them our families.” Aketaa chewed a soft piece of meat for a moment, then said, “Of course, your family’s at least on this planet, in this forest. They can’t be too far off if you made it here in one night. My family, they’re scattered throughout the galaxy like shards of a broken plate.”

Alright, so maybe she was taking advantage of a captive audience, but it was nice to have something there to talk to that didn’t scurry away after five minutes and wasn’t a tree. She was feeling sentimental on account of this lost little creature, so Aketaa told it all about her life. Her mother had told her all about her grandmother, who wasn’t really her grandmother, and she tried to remember how all the stories went. Then she talked about Shili the way she remembered it, through child’s eyes, and about moving away from it to learn from Luke Skywalker, for all the good that did her. She must have spoke too loudly, because the animal raised its pointed head, blinked up at her, and lowered it again, this time extending its long neck to press the tip of its dark purple nose against her thigh. Aketaa’s heart practically melted, and if she wasn’t sure about the singer before, she now knew that she would die for it without question.

Continuing in a much softer voice, she went on: “You know, Kylo Ren was my first friend at Master Skywalker’s academy. He was Ben Solo back then, just a boy as sad as I was to be away from home. I’m only a couple years younger than him, or maybe it’s three years? I think it’s two years. Anyway, I arrived when I was six, and Ben had been there a year already. I don’t know why I gravitated to him instead of one of the other students—there were a handful there around our age. Maybe it’s because I could tell he was lonely, more so than anyone else.” She found a bone in the stew and picked it up to suck at the marrow. “Master Skywalker tried to enforce that whole Jedi-can’t-have-strong-attachments rule, but I’m pretty sure Ben and I were, as the kids say, dating by the time I turned fifteen. That’s not a great word for it, though, because we didn’t go on dates, not really. We just spent almost all our time together, and...” She trailed off and gnawed absently on the bone. “Anyway,” she said, “it was a long time ago, and it didn’t go well. Maybe it would have gone better if that voice hadn’t been in his head, dragging out his Darkness. I could feel it there with him. By the end, I never knew when it would suddenly take over him. And then, you know, he and Master Skywalker started fighting one night, and next thing you know, he’s calling himself Kylo Ren and burning the academy and temple, asking the other students to join him in the Dark side or die.” She snorted, but quietly, for the singer. “That was a mess. That’s how I ended up with one short lek,” Aketaa told it, balancing her stew in her lap to hold up the scarred end of her right front lek. 

For a moment, she fingered the puckered scar, remembering back to that night. He had burst into her room, kicking the door open with more force than was necessary. Aketaa had already been awake, feeling the pain of the deaths in the Force and watching the flames grow and spread from her window. She should have run earlier. He tried to appeal to her first, asked her to join him, but she could feel that Dark presence so strongly that she was too afraid to speak—Snoke, she realized years later, right there in his head, poisoning his mind. Then he demanded, then he threatened, and then he ignited his lightsaber with a growl of frustration and anger. That’s when she finally reacted, and her jade green blade met his emerald one in a clash of bright light. He was stronger in this fight than he was when they sparred for practice, and it was all she could do to worm her way around him and dash out the door and towards the hangar. He followed her, tried to hold her with the Force, but he was more of a mess inside than the academy was outside, so he couldn’t pin her down for more than a minute. A second battle, and her guard slipped, and in a blink of an eye the end of her lek was hitting the floor with a fleshy slap, leaving a sizzling stump behind. She knows she screamed, because she felt it buzzing in her montrals so loudly that it made them ache, and the pain must have fueled her last desperate attempt to get away. She gave one mighty Force push, and Kylo Ren was thrown back into the hangar wall, hard. It bought her enough time to escape in the ship.

Aketaa sighed and finished her breakfast stew. The past was the past. What was important now was that she didn’t get herself killed while trying to talk Kylo Ren out of tyrannical power through the Dark side. Rey seemed to be a workable angle. The more she thought about it over the past months, the better she liked the idea of appealing to Kylo through discussions of Rey. Their Force connection was very interesting, especially because the bond persisted after Snoke, the perceived cause, was dead. Balance, Master Skywalker had stressed to her. Find balance, seek balance, restore balance. Was this the Force manifesting its own balance in joining Kylo Ren to Rey? Aketaa wished she could meet Rey; perhaps if she did, she could confirm or discard this idea. But no, Rey was lightyears across the galaxy from Echara—just like everything else.

—

He became aware of her presence as if she had just stepped into the room where he sat meditating. 

“It’s been a while,” he said, seeing her wrapped in a heavy cloak in his mind’s eye. “It must be cold where you’re hiding.”

She nodded, to his surprise. “Colder than I’d like, yes. There’s no climate quite as perfect as those warm Shili grasslands.” Casually, she looked around and adjusted the fabric of the cloak, pulling it tighter around her. “You keep your spaces nice and chilled, too, I see. Thank you,” she added, “for supplying a setting this time.”

He didn’t even realize he was producing a mimicry of his quarters for this mental meeting until she pointed this out, and he rushed to clear the place of anything too personal—not that he had many personal affects to begin with. As if she was idly curious, she stepped further into the colorless room to drag her vibrant fingertips across the glass tabletop, then the back of his desk chair. With a sigh, she came to a stop only a few steps from where he was seated on the thin rug, looking out the floor-to-ceiling viewport at the stars. He looked up at her as she admired the view. The cloak, a warm tan color, made of a rough-knit fabric, obstructed the shape of her body and length of her headtails, but he could still appreciate her strong nose and prominent cheekbones.

“There’s nothing quite like the view of stars from among the stars to make you feel totally insignificant, is there?” she asked softly.

He didn’t answer. After a moment, she stepped around him, brushing his knees with the cloak, and walked over to his bed. She sat on the mattress and made a face, wrinkling up her nose and furrowing her white brow markings. Settling cross-legged in a mound of heavy fabric at the foot of his large bed, she looked very small. Even the horns, which he noticed had grown into a more pronounced and graceful curve since he had last seen her in person, only added to the dwarfing effect. It was all an illusion, of course, and maybe she was even projecting herself like that on purpose to look non-threatening or something.

“Such a hard mattress,” she said. “How do you sleep on this thing without feeling sore?”

“It’s supportive,” he snapped. “Anything softer and my back hurts.”

She winced in a dramatic way. “Are you getting old, Ben? You’re, what, 30 now, aren’t you?”

He rolled his eyes and turned back to face the viewport. “Are you here to talk about your philosophy again?”

“I’d like to talk about Rey, actually. I wish I could meet her myself, but for now I have to settle for knowing her through you.”

“That’s a ridiculous notion,” he scoffed. “I’m anything but an unbiased source of information.”

“Well, yes, I know, but I like to think your perception of her adds flavor to the whole situation. It’ll be interesting to see in which direction your bias leans.” She paused, and then asked, “Does it bother you when I call you ‘Ben’? It felt right when I appeared as my younger self, but...” She trailed off.

Actually, no one had asked him that question before. People either knew him as Kylo Ren, the Supreme Leader and dread Knight of the Order of Ren, or they wanted him to be Ben Solo again. He had chosen the name ‘Kylo’ all those years ago, but in truth both names caused him pain. Of course he was bothered by being Ben: all that meant was another person desperate for things to go back to the way they were, unable to see that he could never go back now even if he wanted to. And yet, maybe it would sting even more to hear the name ‘Kylo’ in her mouth. But wasn’t that what he deserved after everything? Aketaa, whom he had betrayed more than any of them, precisely because she had never betrayed him, now returned to him the pain he had caused her, as was her right.

He realized he had been sitting silent for too long. “I’m not Ben Solo anymore,” he told her, “and I won’t ever be Ben Solo again. I would ask that you respect my new name and title, but—“ he shrugged, “—I know you’ll do as you please.”

“Alright. You chose to be Kylo Ren, after all; as I don’t wish to make an enemy of you, it’s only right I respect the name you chose. Just don’t expect me to hail you as anything but a very large man-child.” He heard her shifting on the bed behind him. “So, Ky—can I use a diminutive?—tell me about what Rey is like in person.”

Ky was a plucky teenager who could take trick shots with a blaster, not an adult ruler of the galaxy, but he found he didn’t hate it. He let it slide and answered her request. “She’s...intense.” Yes, that was the best word to describe her. “Nothing she does is done half-hearted, like she concentrates all of her willpower into each moment she lives. And the raw Force is strong in her; before she understood what it was, she was fighting against me and winning.”

“That’s quite the admission,” she said.

“There’s no point in lying, not to you,” he replied. “There’s nothing you can do to me but talk.”

She hummed, a noncommittal noise. “If there’s no point in lying, then what do you think of her, truly? You told me you felt you understood each other, and obviously you think highly enough of her to offer her a place of power with you. How did you understand each other? What is it about her that appealed to you?”

It ached to think about it all: those first moments of connection, exposing their vulnerabilities to each other, growing comfortable just talking, until that outpouring of acceptance from her as she told him he wasn’t alone and reached out her hand to him; the strange and unexpected joy he felt when he sensed that she was coming to him, his anticipation so great that he even combed his hair; that glorious and triumphant battle, during which they had trusted each other so effortlessly and completely, culminating in his clumsy and tactless offer and their terrible struggle that rent Skywalker’s lightsaber in two. To top it all off, he had watched her shut the door, cutting him off from her deep well of empathy. He clenched his jaw for a moment and took in a deep breath.

“She was a mystery, at first, this scavenger rat who was more powerful than I expected. It must have been the first time in her life she had encountered the Force, and she was pushing against my probe and reaching into my head during what should have been my interrogation of her. Then of course she escaped, I’m sure with the help of the new power she discovered. We fought, and it was like the Force was fighting through her; it must have been, because this was her first time in a lightsaber duel and she bested me. Not long after, the Force bond connected us.”

“And that was when you felt something for her, after the bond gave you time with her?”

“Neither of us knew what was going on, at first, but she used the opportunity to lash out at me. That’s very like her, by the way. It’s her impulse to feel very strongly one way or the other and make up her mind very resolutely. She doesn’t stop and think until she must.”

“Hm. Then conflict does not sit well with her?”

“No, I don’t think it does. She told me I was a monster, and I agreed with her. That seemed to stun her, to have her own assumptions about my villainy confronted like that. I don’t think it took very long for her to convince herself I could be persuaded to the Light after that.”

There was a rustling of fabric, and then Aketaa appeared at his side, sitting down a respectful distance away and stretching her legs out in front of her. Her red-orange feet with their white-striped toes were bare. “But what happened next? Something must have happened that appealed to your heart. You still have a heart, I know.”

He knew exactly what did it. It was a mistake, a moment of weakness—it was foolish. “She trusted me,” he sighed, looking out at the infinite dazzle of stars, each distant and as coldly beautiful as crystals of ice, snowflakes caught on his black gloves and frost forming on his black cloak. “She confided in me because I wasn’t a monster anymore. And she was so lost and so sad after her encounter with the Dark side—not important now,” he said quickly, waving away Aketaa’s sudden curiosity. “I tried to offer her some comfort, tell her she wasn’t alone, and she immediately turned it around to share it with me.” 

For an immeasurable amount of time, perhaps seconds or hours, they were silent, sitting on the floor next to each other. And then: “Oh, sweet man,” she whispered, “I wish I had loved you more.” 

She turned and leaned over to kiss his cheek, and then, like mist evaporating in the sunlight, she was gone.

—

Aketaa killed with her teeth. That’s what they were designed to do, after all, and becoming a primal hunter for a short while suited her just fine. The ground-dwellers were active enough at dusk, and she was still able to find an abundance of them in the forest. She made quick work of one to roast and feast on that night, then decided to catch a second to make a stew for the coming days. There had been no lunch for her that day, not after sitting so long next to the singer, hesitant to disturb it in any way, so she was hungry enough to devour a whole ground-dweller in minutes. While she was there, she searched for patches of the plants that would yield her their bulbous and starchy roots. There was an herb, too, that reminded her of sweet mint, and another that had a pungent bite raw but boiled down to a delicious smoky flavor. These she gathered to flavor the stew.

During the hours upon hours she spent at the little creature’s side, Aketaa had meditated. She grounded herself to peaceful Echara, feeling the wind whistling through the blue grasses and darkening needle trees. Around her campsite, the Echaran wildlife went about their busy lives. She thought she could even feel the faint breath of the singer herd as they slept, far away and safe. Nothing stuck out to her as an identifiable predator, but she didn’t linger on that for long. The victims of time decomposed in the dirt, things reaching the ends of their lives, leaf litter and small bodies broken down by fungi and insects she had not yet seen for herself, becoming food for the new growth of the planet. Death linked cosmically to life, as it always has been and always will be. Dark and Light, eternal.

Then, when she rose from the details of her immediate surroundings and observed the web of all interconnected sentient life, she picked up Kylo Ren’s meditative energy without even needing to think about it. Hadn’t she just been telling the singer that she couldn’t let her visits to him become frequent again? Yes, but in her deepest needs, she was lonely, and he was the only one she could talk to who could give her that satisfaction of companionship. It wasn’t so difficult to hide out on Raydonia, where she was surrounded by her friends and students, and even on Tatooine she had spent her time surrounded by an almost crushing population and been honored with the attention of Ryla. On Echara, she was withering, just a bit, and she wanted so badly to have a conversation.

She debated with herself for a short while before finally reaching out to cling to his consciousness for a little while. It felt a little desperate to her, but hopefully it had been long enough since the last visit that Kylo wouldn’t pick up on her incredible isolation. It seemed to her that he didn’t. He was more composed than usual, and he was more open than usual. It was a nice little change of pace, she thought, to not be shouted at or witnessing his suffering. His calm demeanor reminded her of the Ben Solo she used to know, as a matter of fact, though she could never admit such a thing to him. Oh, he used to be calm, alright. There was a time when he didn’t have the violent temper Kylo Ren was so famous for, and he was instead just a thoughtful and reserved boy, perhaps more prone to frustration than others, but so driven to figure it all out in the end, focusing with a quiet determination until he understood and succeeded. He was still that same person in there, somewhere hidden under the layers of damage done to him by his upbringing and Snoke’s particular influence.

Initially, Aketaa wanted to add his years steeped in the Dark side to his horrible influences, but she hesitated. What was the Dark side, really? She’d been over this before. It was half of the universe, it was death and decay, it was violence and anger, grief and passion. It was in everyone in some measure, some more than others, that was certain. It was as natural as the Light side. Aketaa was sure Kylo Ren was Dark, but that was perhaps not such a bad thing in and of itself. And anyway, there was Light in him to temper the rash impulses of the Darkness; he had just been suppressing it over the last decade. So, no, he was not damaged by the Dark side of the Force. The only damage done by Darkness was done by individuals enforcing a dogma of complete Darkness.

The Dark side was present in Rey, too, she would wager. From what Kylo told her, she was no paragon of saint-like Light. She believed him when he said she was passionate and unrestrained. Surely Kylo knew there was some measure of Darkness in her that he had wanted to draw out of her, just as Rey must have thought she could draw out the Light in him. Without doubt, she was his equal and opposite match. Maybe she was so powerful without training because she was free of any extremist ideology and was instead fully herself, and maybe Kylo was limited even with all his training because it was exactly his Dark side training that taught him to suppress those parts of him that would make him strong.

When she returned to her camp, the sun had sunk down behind the trees. The little singer was emerging from the ship.

“Hello, little one,” Aketaa said, speaking softly to avoid startling it. It offered her a little trill as it stepped into the grass at the foot of the ramp. “So, what do you eat? You must be hungry.”

As she built up her fire, Aketaa observed the creature as it walked around, methodically inspecting everything in her little campsite of a clearing. It nosed at her as she sat to skin the first ground-dweller before wandering away again, making Aketaa smile for a moment before returning her attention to the dead animal in her lap. She sliced here and cut there before skillfully ripping the main body of the hide from the meat. Another glance up to the singer, and she found it was grazing peacefully only a yard or two from where she sat.

“You’re a forager species, then?” She sat and watched the creature step with its eight thin legs, long neck reaching to nibble the stalks of blue grass. “I wonder if you’re an herbivore or an omnivore.”

Once the ground-dweller was impaled on the spit and set to roast over the flames, Aketaa relaxed and licked at her bloody hunting knife, wet from the skinning. She’d skin the second one later when she was ready to boil a stew. For now, it was sitting to the side with her gathered herbs and tubers. It would be a late night, but that was fine. Her eyes were designed for seeing easily in the dark. Anyway, her new friend was nocturnal, so she might as well spend some time observing its habits.

So passed the evening, and many after it. She was growing comfortable on Echara, even though the winter was setting in. The frost began to last longer and longer in the mornings, and then one night Aketaa could see it begin to form over the landscape. The singer didn’t seem to mind it, but Aketaa did. It was cold inside her ship, though it was out of the wind, and she decided to build a small fire inside where it could keep her warm while she slept.

—

He felt it: just a hint, an indication, like the faintest curl of smoke from a stick of incense. It was Aketaa. Whatever shields she had been using to block him out had been strong, very strong, but now they started to weaken. It was her own fault. She wasn’t disciplined enough to sustain her excursions into his mind while guarding her presence. Before it slipped away, he grabbed it, pulling it and twisting it around until it was a solid thread, real and concrete in his mind. This, finally, was her connection to the Force, made accessible and traceable to him. He decided to reach out along the line and follow it to its source. It wouldn’t tell him her physical location, but maybe he could get a read on her.

It occurred to him that he didn’t know what he expected or what he wanted out of finding her Force signature, other than confirming once and for all that she was truly real and not just some trick sent to invade his psyche. By whom, he had no idea, but it was always a possibility. As Supreme Leader, there was now a larger target on his head that he must acknowledge.

But no, she was there, yes, just the slightest pulse from very far away. He concentrated his energy on it until he had amplified it for himself, tuning his senses to its existence. He had to make sure he could find her in the Force again. Rey was lost to him; though they still saw each other through the bond, she knew how to shut him out very effectively. If he could feel Aketaa’s signature, he could perhaps use it as a comfort the way he had grown to use Rey’s signature. At least one person in the whole kriffing galaxy cared about him, and that was all he needed to reassure himself of now and then.

He wondered…the flicker of her life was weak to him, but maybe it would be enough. He shifted, took a deep breath, and focused. Grab the thread that lead to her consciousness, follow it, grip her signature—was there a way in? He envisioned the walls keeping the world out and saw were they were starting to fall apart. Tap, pick, scratch, break them open.

—

It was time to brave the cold to take a bath. She’d been avoiding it because of the cold, but she could smell the smoke of burning wood and meat on her skin, mixed with the sweat from wearing so many layers. In honesty, she felt grimy and gross, and so a wash was necessary. She gathered soap and towels and started the walk to the lake. The singer—whose name, she’d decided, was Krishden, after one of her muscially-inclined Raydonian students—walked along with her, moving much more deftly over the terrain with its many legs than Aketaa did with her two legs. 

At the lake, Krishden happily stopped to drink, pleased with such an adventure so early in its evening. Aketaa dipped her foot in the crystal-clear water. Cold. Very cold. Very, very cold. She cursed the fact that she didn’t have a tub big enough to fill with heated water for a proper bath. With an annoyed huff, she undressed, dropping her clothes on the shore. The air was already so cold. She waded into the lake, and stars, it was freezing. Before she started really shivering, Aketaa used the Force to retrieve the soap from the shore. Her lekku and toes were beginning to tingle, but she lathered the soap over her arms anyway.

And then, a mental pulse, so strong it made her vision go white for a split second. It was followed by searing pain jolting through her skull. She dropped the soap into the water and cried out, hands pressing against her head. The pulse, the lightning bold of pain, a second time, a third, a fourth. Her feet slipped on the lakebed, and though she was only standing in water as deep as her waist, she went under. Her mouth filled with icy lake water as she screamed. She wasn’t submerged long. She surfaced and coughed, gagging on the water she had choked down, and still the pain continued. It felt like her brain was shattering.

Clumsily, she stumbled out of the lake, splashing her way onto the shore, and she collapsed on the smooth stones. Curling into a ball now, kicking her legs out the next second, writhing and thrashing, she cried. She gasped as something like a hot poker impaled her spine, ramming from the base of her skull down to her tailbone. Then, it all stopped, leaving her aching and panting.

Someone there. A presence in the Force. Speaking in her head.

“I did not intend to cause so much pain,” it said.

“Well,” she wheezed aloud, “you did.”

Gone now. Alone. Kriff. Stars. Kriffing stars. Aketaa raised herself up on shaking arms and legs, snatching up the towels to wrap around her freezing body. Krishden was gone. She probably scared her little friend away with her screaming. She was now isolated all over again. Who the hell was that?

—

Well. That had not gone as well as he had hoped. He had never maintained mental shields in the Force like that for so many years, and he hadn’t known that they would be so painful to dismantle. Breaking the guard of someone else always causes some mental pain, but he truly hadn’t known it would be so immense for her. He had gotten flashes as it happened: a lake, trees, a pebbled shore. He heard her cries of pain ringing in his ears. She would never trust him again, in all likelihood, but then, had she trusted him in the first place? She hid from him and disguised herself as a memory, and she wouldn’t give him any direct answers to his questions. Maybe she deserved to feel the pain as retribution for shutting him out. Still, he couldn’t help but let her know it wasn’t supposed to hurt that much.

Now her signature was strong, a brightly shining life open for him to see without her crumbling shields in the way. He prodded at it, trying to take its measure without letting her know. There was the Light, burning bright at her core, but here and there were mottled shadows of Darkness, flowing and mingling with the rays of the Light side freely. It was odd. He could feel the proportions fluctuate just in the short moments he sat there watching it. Was she conflicted and struggling? She hadn’t seemed so when she visited him. Even now, he sensed no distress other than the pain he had put her through, though he wasn’t sure how accurate he could be with these things given the ridiculous distance she had surely put between them. 

If she could span it undetected, then so could he. He had the advantage of eight more years of training than she had, so getting into her mind should be a piece of cake. What would happen, he wondered, if he invaded while she was still awake and aware? All her visits took place while he was asleep or at least meditating. Would he see through her eyes, like the memory she sent by accident? He was curious, and he wanted more from her than he had already glimpsed today, so he put up a shield and dove into her mind.

It was more difficult than he had anticipated to worm his way into her head. She wasn’t passive as she might have been while dreaming or meditating; she was active and alert. He tried to find that same orientation from the memory, trying to mimic the feeling of being in the middle of it as a silent observer. It sort of worked, he supposed. He heard her breathing, heavy and rasping, and distant nighttime calls of far-off things, again eerily loud and reverberant: the sound she received with her horns, fed through his ears. Her eyes were closed, and it was dark beyond the lids. He felt himself break out in goosebumps as the shocking cold she felt washed over him, and a pounding ache grew in his head. In a few blinks, the eyes were open, and he saw a strangely illuminated nighttime forest, lit beyond the power of her blazing fire. This was natural night vision: it was as if he were seeing through goggles, yet the image was color-corrected, not green-toned, and perfectly clear. It was incredible—and to think, many species saw like this all the time and took it for granted.

Barely a minute, but he had seen all he wanted to see. He left, leaving her sensory experiences behind. None of the flora he saw was at all recognizable, and he didn’t even know if her night vision portrayed the true colors of her surroundings, which could confound any attempts as identification. At least he could rule out the more popular locations.

Finding her...why did he want to find her? Was there a reason to see her in the flesh, or was it reflex to track down the people in his past to finish them off? With no one to order her dead, he didn’t think he would kill her if he found her. He found he didn’t want her to die, though the feeling was nowhere near as strong as his utter desperation to stop Rey’s torture at the hands of Snoke. He wouldn’t kill for her like he would kill for Rey, because even after all that had broken between him and the scavenger girl, he knew he would do it all over again without hesitation. But as irksome as Aketaa sometimes was to him, he wouldn’t kill her.

He had tried to, once. It was a different time, when he was young, angry, hurt, and desperate to prove he wasn’t too weak to do it. “Kill them, all of them,” Snoke had whispered to him that night. Following Skywalker’s betrayal, he had been unstable enough to actually go on that rampage, setting fire to the campus of buildings at the academy and the temple itself, slaughtering those who tried to stop him. Three of his fellow students converted and followed him that night, and together they joined the Knights of Ren. Sparing their three lives had made him all the more determined to kill Aketaa when she refused to be spared too, and he had felt triple the rage when she got away. Weakness. And, really, it had been a mistake to amputate a piece of her headtail; she had channeled the pain, and that was how she finally escaped him: a Dark side instinct, actually, to use something like pain as a means of power and strength.

That was something he had realized when he was taught to do the same thing by Snoke months after his conversion. He had laughed at the irony of it then, that Jedi apprentice Aketaa had Dark side instincts and probably didn’t even know it. Now, though, he thought about it more carefully, turning the idea around in his mind. It reminded him of Rey and the way her actions and words could be driven by fear, anger, and spite in a way the Jedi would have discouraged. Aketaa’s words came back to him. “The world isn’t black and white like they told us it is, and it’s time you start understanding that,” she had said.

The buzz of the comm interrupted his thoughts and broke his meditation. He growled as the blue hologram of Hux materialized on his desk. “What?” he barked.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> time to talk about ~consent~ with respect to the dream/force visits. reminder: ASK FOR AND RESPECT CONSENT when you're dealing with people in real life. i do not condone the sketchy invasion of privacy shit going on here, it's for the drama and the plot and for the sake of exploring morally gray characters.

After Aketaa stopped shaking from the shock and the cold, she huddled by her fire to probe the Force. Her shields were broken, that much was immediately obvious. She had been so used to holding them up that she didn’t even think about it anymore, and that must have been why she didn’t realize what was happening while it was happening. Kylo Ren must have done it; who else was there? Knowing her walls were gone, she felt vulnerable and exposed. Force knew what he would do now that he had a way in. There was no use trying to build up those shields again. Having torn them down once, it would only be easier for him to do it again, and she would rather save herself the pain of going through it another time. She would just have to be careful. She could still guard her thoughts, as the distance was so great that he wouldn’t be able to focus in on the finer details of her mind. And anyway, this was such an off-the-radar place that there would be no records of its native species he could find.

Krishden returned to her camp after the moon was high in the sky, bleating a soft little melody and bumping its nose into her shoulder and arm insistently. With slow movements, Aketaa reached over to give it a cautious stroke. Its eyes closed, and it didn’t move away, so she continued to pet down the sides of its neck. The blue pelt felt velvety and soft. It helped ground her, the repetitiveness and tactility of petting Krishden, and she appreciated that the animal trusted her enough to allow such a thing. How strange to be a predator so enamored with a prey animal. If the circumstances had been different, maybe Aketaa would be hunting the singers like she hunted the ground-dwellers and had attempted to hunt the tree-swingers.

It was harrowing, for several days, to know that Kylo Ren had access to her head and might show up any time he wished. She knew it was only a matter of time before he made his move. Whether it would be against her or towards her, she couldn’t guess. Hopefully by now he wouldn’t want to come kill her, but Aketaa didn’t want to trust that hope. There was always the chance he would work himself up into one of his infamous episodes and decide to hunt her down in irrational anger. As time went on with not a peep from him, though, she started to relax, just a bit. Grudgingly, she admitted—though it was only to herself—that feeling the Force in the planet was even easier and more gratifying without maintaining those blocks.

On an unrelated (or perhaps related) note, Aketaa decided no more wintertime baths. It was too cold by far, and it was only getting colder. She had been on Echara, what, four months, going on five? There were no records of the planet beyond its existence and some vague coordinates that corresponded to an outdated location system, so Force only knew how long winter would last; she didn’t even know if she arrived during summer or autumn. Ideally winter wouldn’t last longer than another two months or so, but Aketaa knew there was a chance it could be more like three. She’d take dusty, dry Tatooine over this cursed winter any day. So, until the weather turned warmer and the danger of freezing to death passed, Aketaa figured she would do her best to bathe with a soapy rag—soaked in heated water, of course.

By the time it was cold enough for a wet snow to clump up the darkened blue grass, Aketaa was keeping to the warmer interior of the ship, only leaving to hunt. The ground-dwellers hibernated, she learned, as did the burrowers, and Aketaa refused to dive in the lake to find possible fish, so she learned through trial and error how to catch the tree-swingers. It wasn’t easy, and it involved some Force-supported maneuvering more often than not, but she found the animals were bigger up close and meatier than she had expected. One swinger, cooked for a long time in a stew to make the tough meat palatable, lasted her almost a week.

When she wasn’t hunting or worrying that she might burn down her ship with her indoor fire, she was typing on the datapad. It had become something of a journal, wrapping her musings on the Force, her daily routine, and observations of Echara all into one sprawling account. When this mess was over, she’d have to find someone to untangle it into its separate pieces for her. Having had more than enough time to ponder over it, Aketaa believed a new philosophy was vital to the Force religions, and she hoped her notes were an acceptable start to a new school of thought.

But then, without meaning to, Aketaa remembered how she had spent the better part of a decade in hiding, guarded. Some possessive, secretive part of her was reluctant to let anyone know where she had been. She was loathe to let loose the treasure that was a perfect hiding spot. It was a whole planet uncharted and unknown, a perfect place to avoid unwanted visitors, and if she began the work of identifying the ecosystem of Echara, it would no longer be so perfectly isolated. 

Stars, Aketaa hated being isolated. She wanted to be among a crowd of people again, whether she knew who they were or not. She wanted to feel hidden by the throng, just a face among faces in a crush of life. Echara was torture, and yet Aketaa couldn’t bear the thought of losing its security.

—

This time, she was the one dreaming. He could sense the shift in her energy, the signal he had been waiting for, that switch over from active to passive thought. Inhale, exhale, and reach.

It was a completely different experience to invade a mind just to talk. He was used to digging for information, a process that was usually torture for those who resisted, and of course everyone resisted. Even before, when he had just broken down her walls and had wanted to see through her eyes, he had only focused on being undetected. She was in pain already from his efforts, and he was sure if that simple intrusion had hurt, she couldn’t have noticed. This, though, was a delicate matter. He was a guest in her subconscious, like the apparition of an internal Force ghost. Except he obviously wasn’t dead. 

He found himself standing in the middle of a crowded street, with all dusty tan buildings and dusty tan people. It was familiar, but something was off. Through the myriad of species bustling about their business, eyes all squinting against the bright sunlight and hot air, he spotted the curved, white-and-navy shapes of her horns, and he realized what seemed so strange. Now he was seeing the scene from a different point of view.

The crowd thinned for a moment, just long enough to see her stumble over her own feet. Her hand, he noticed, was clutching her shoulder and cradling her corresponding headtail. Blood seeped through the cracks between her fingers. Even though he knew what was coming next, he felt a pang in his chest that seemed an awful lot like concern. He followed her, pushing through the fragments of a remembered crowd with ease. She ducked into the first real doorway they reached, and he went in after her.

They were in the bar. She all but collapsed in a stool at the counter, and he cautiously claimed the seat to her left. That teal-skinned Twi’lek was there, he realized.

“Can I getcha something?” the Twi’lek asked, resting her hands on the bar and cocking one hip. “Booze? Light apps?” With a look he wanted to describe as calculating or analyzing, the Twi’lek gave one up-and-down sweep with her eyes before adding, “Some bacta and a nap?”

There was only a thin whine in response. Deciding now would be as good a time as any to step in, he said, “Aketaa.” He received a grunt, so he tried again: “Aketaa, it’s me.”

The white stripes on her brow furrowed, and then she turned her golden yellow eyes towards him. For a moment, she squinted at him, and then he saw recognition. “Well, cut my hand off and call me a sand rat; it really is you, huh?” She started to move to face him, but her headtail caught on the fabric of her top and stopped her in a wince.

“I really think you need some bacta,” the Twi’lek repeated. “I have some upstairs.”

“Oh,” Aketaa wheezed. “Ah, Ky, this is Ryla. Ryla, Ky.”

“Pleasure,” Ryla the Twi’lek said, voice curt. “Come on upstairs with me, now.”

It seemed this was a dream not easily derailed, perhaps because it was a specific memory. As gently as he could, he helped Aketaa off the barstool and around to the back stairs. “I just—ah, ow—just want the bacta,” Aketaa told him. “That’s all—just the bacta, and then we can talk.”

“How much does that hurt, actually?” he asked, allowing her to lean heavily on his arm as they walked up the sand-brick stairs.

“Have you been shot by a blaster? Sliced by a lightsaber?”

“Obviously.” The scar across his face should be proof enough of that.

“Yeah.” She paused to grit her teeth as her headtail bounced a little too hard against her chest. “Imagine that, but dialed up to, well, the most sensitive skin on your body? I guess? Kriff,” she hissed. “Did you have to take such a big chunk out of me?”

He had no answer to that. They made it to the top of the stairs, anyway. Ryla didn’t seem to notice he was there unless Aketaa specifically pointed out his presence, which was fine by him. She stripped off Aketaa’s wrapped Jedi tunic, leaving her in soft knee-length pants and a sleeveless top, meant for sleeping, he knew. After all, he had attacked in the middle of the night. With the grime wiped away and the wounds dressed with bacta, Ryla settled on the mattress in the room, next to Aketaa. Yellow eyes slid over to him again, and then Aketaa said, “Thanks, Ryla, but I’d like to talk to my friend here, alone, if you don’t mind.”

Could she pick up on his emotions during these dream visits? He hoped not, because he didn’t really want her to know that he was both relieved and disappointed that she spoke up when she did.

“So,” she said, breathing a little easier and looking a little more relaxed now that the bacta was easing her pain, “you figured it out.” Aketaa patted the space on the bed next to her, indicating he should sit. “I know you’re not going out of your way to mask your presence because I can sense your signature here, but I’m a little surprised that I’m not in excruciating pain right now.”

He scowled. “I’m not interrogating you, and you’re not resisting.”

“I know. But after you disintegrated my shields down to nothing with absolutely no warning, I was concerned that all of your visits might hurt similarly.”

“How would you have had me warn you?” he snapped. “It was precisely your shields that prevented such communication.”

“Maybe you could have waited and actually brought it up during our next conversation?” she suggested.

“Yes, the conversations that were up until now entirely on your terms.”

She frowned. “Okay, I admit it was unfair to drop in repeatedly without your consent once I stopped the dream figure ruse. It was also unfair of you to attempt killing me and to destroy the place and people I had called home for over ten years.”

“Touché,” he admitted. “Can we call it even?”

“Absolutely not.” Gingerly, she adjusted her seated position, bringing one leg up to lean on with her elbow. “It’ll be even only if I set fire to your life and maim you with intent to murder, which will never happen because I’m not influenced by the mental intrusions of a villainous psychopath.” She paused just long enough to make him uneasy, but then continued, “We’ll never be even, but that’s a good thing. I’m not looking for revenge. What you did wasn’t okay, and you shouldn’t have done it, but I do forgive you for doing it.”

He shifted. Her words were full of Jedi-taught magnanimity, certainly: forgiveness and letting go were the ways of the Light siders. Yet, her tone was almost…disgruntled. “You forgive me?” 

“Well, yes,” she shrugged. “I do blame you, of course, because if I didn’t blame you then there would be no need to forgive you. I blame you for for actions, but I also blame your influences. If the world had been kinder to you, and if Snoke hadn’t gotten to you, then maybe you would have decided not to go on a rampage. If Master Skywalker hadn’t lost control of himself for that one moment, then maybe there wouldn’t have been a different catalyst. In the end, you still chose to do what you did, and I forgive you for that.”

That, he decided, was something he’d have to process later. The tan surroundings began to dissolve and dematerialize, and with a gentle smile, so did Aketaa.

—

Ever since he invaded her dream two weeks ago, Aketaa had been in a bad mood. “Okay,” she growled at the trees. “Okay, so it sucks to have someone show up in your head unannounced. I get it!” She screamed, “What else was I supposed to do! How else was I going to reach him!” She groaned, “I know, I know, he gave me a taste of my own medicine and I don’t like it, I know.” Would she do it again if time rewound? Probably. She still saw no other way to communicate with him while maintaining a safe physical distance. Did this mean she’d have to tolerate his communication via the same established method? Yes, absolutely, and Aketaa was thusly frustrated with no solution besides gritting her teeth and bearing it. The trees, with their snow-laden boughs, offered her no help.

All there was to do was wait. She sat by her fire, writing out her internal monologue on the datapad, Krishden at her side as blissfully nocturnal as ever. Nothing else to be done but wait and wonder about the machinations of the First Order and the Rebellion, the balance between Light and Dark as it could manifest in a Force-user, and the relationship between Rey and Kylo Ren. She could reach out to him, but she didn’t want to. Stubbornly, she wanted to wait for him to come to her again if he really wanted to talk, as much as she didn’t like being caught unawares in the middle of her dreams.

When the lake froze over, Aketaa wrapped herself in as many cloaks and blankets as she could cobble together and stuffed her feet into her moccasins. Krishden bounding happily alongside her, she trudged through the thin layer of wet snow, intent on doing something, anything, that would provide a much-needed change of pace. She had never seen a frozen body of water before, and there was no time like the present. Though she was shivering and her extremities were going numb from the cold, the sun glittering on the surface of the ice and snow was beautiful and ethereal enough that it took Aketaa’s breath away. A slight dusting of snow had collected in patches on the lake surface, and she could see the small tracks patterned on the clean slate here and there of taloned and toed feet. Some sort of bird-like species must have escaped her notice, though if they were fish-eaters that only lived by the lake, that could explain why. Now that it was frozen, perhaps they would migrate away. There were hoof tracks like Krishden’s, too, trailing around the edges of the lake where the ice must have been sturdier. Aketaa wondered how it would be to walk on the ice herself, though she wasn’t sure if it was possible. Maybe she would be too heavy and fall through. Or would she melt it with her feet? It was best not to risk falling into the cold, cold water again; she shivered just thinking about it.

There were mushrooms pushing up through the snow here and there, probably growing on the winter-dead underbrush, but Aketaa didn’t trust unfamiliar mushrooms. It was too difficult to guess which ones might be edible and which might kill you in seconds. She’d been using the bittersweet bulbs of some tall blue grass to flavor her stew, and once in a while she would spot the wilted foliage of the starch tubers, but her herbs were unavailable until spring, assumedly, as were the juicy ground-dwellers. While she was out, Aketaa dug up some more bulbs to take back home with her.

Krishden trailed along behind her to and from the lake, being quite patient as Aketaa did her bit of foraging, but as soon as they were back at camp, the singer trotted inside and curled up to sleep the rest of the day away. Aketaa stowed the bulbs with her other stocked-up vegetables and sat with her datapad.

“The concept of an order honoring the cycle of life and death in nature, as driven by the Light and Dark energies of the Force, feels the most appropriate, I think,” she said. “It feels true that we should accept and embrace both Light and Dark in ourselves and the world. That’s the balance Master Luke was finding, I know it is. I suppose we have to trust that the Force itself is the best protector of its balance, though I don’t believe that means we should do nothing in the face of oppression and wanton suffering. That’s something I still have to figure out, Krishden.”

The afternoon was a studious one, and then Aketaa paused for a stew dinner. She decided it might be beneficial to spend the evening meditating on the problem of injustice, so she did. If she started where she was certain, namely that both Light and Dark must coexist in balance, then she must extend that of course to the cycle of life and death, which further divides into the things associated with life and the things associated with death, and at its most basic, positive and negative. Should that allow utopias and tyrannies to exist at once? But utopias are impossible—because of the inherent Darkness in everyone. Maybe it was more about accepting that there is evil in the galaxy and always will be, as there is good and always will be, and these things will appear together on large and small scales. Is it wrong, though, to work towards a goal of spreading Light? Perhaps not, as long as it is understood that the Dark must also be there. Where, though?

Aketaa took a mental step back from the problem of sentient societies and returned to nature. It was simpler in nature. Birth, growth, reproduction, death, decay, nourishment. Happiness and sadness. Generosity and short tempers. Forgiveness and revenge. Love. Fear. It solved nothing for her.

Hours must have passed; the night was at its darkest and Krishden was gone, probably to graze in the snow outside. With a sigh, she typed some thought about how at the level of nature, the Force truly has full glory, but when societies are built and organizations must come together, problems of great complexity arise, in which it seems good people must be aligned with the Light side and bad people must be aligned with the Dark side, but perhaps this is not so. Perhaps the Force does not govern our choices, only influence them by means of our natures and situations. That was all Aketaa could muster on the topic. Tired of thinking, she went to sleep earlier than she usually did.

—

He retired to his quarters earlier than he usually did. After having to listen to Hux blathering on in flowery words to admirals and heads of departments all day, then listening to an extra, disdain-filled lecture from the scrawny weasel about how he wasn’t taking the role of Supreme Leader seriously enough, what else could he have done? If he were a different man, he would want a drink. But he was himself.

The troopers chatting in the corridor went dead silent. He looked up, and immediately looked away. Rey was standing facing the wall of his quarters, completely soaked and completely naked. Water from what he assumed was a shower was collecting in a puddle on his floor. Apparently the Force had yet again caught one of them at a bad time, though none before had been quite so compromising as being in the refresher. For her sake, he didn’t move and tried not to make a sound. Maybe he could spare her the embarrassment of realizing the bond had opened. Then he heard her gasp—no such luck then. He still didn’t look up from his hands until he heard the troopers in the corridor again, signaling that the moment was over.

He’d clean up the water later. For now, he figured he might as well see what Aketaa was up to. At least she would have something interesting to say to him—or anything to say to him at all. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he breathed in, and reached out. Her signature pulsed gently with the peaceful rhythm of sleep, so he entered her mind on metaphysical tiptoe. It was still unclear to him how exactly he was supposed to do this, but it worked last time, so he hoped it would work again.

It did. Orange grasses surrounded him, nearly as tall as his chest and rustling in the dry wind. He spun around, searching for her striped horns. They should be visible, and they were. She was spinning, arms thrown out and headtails whirling. As he walked towards her, he saw she was smiling like she used to when they were young. She was wearing tanned leather and light-weight fabric in a style unlike anything he had seen her wear before. 

“Aketaa,” he called.

She stopped spinning in the sort of loose-postured way of someone carefree and happy. “Ky,” she answered, still grinning, “you’re here.” Then the smile faltered. “I thought my mother would be here.” Before he could say anything, she continued: “I don’t know what I expected. I can’t even remember my mother’s face. I know you better than I knew her.”

He didn’t know how to respond. He couldn’t tell if she thought he was part of her dream or not. Better to be direct about it. “I’m not part of this dream. I just wanted to talk to you.”

“You—oh.” She blinked, then she turned away from him to look out at the landscape. “I don’t know which is sadder, dreaming that I’m totally alone on Shili or believing for a moment that I construed you as the only family I have left.” After a moment’s pause, she started walking away, so he followed her. “I’m a pack species, you know. Being totally alone doesn’t come naturally to Togruta. I think I’m starting to go crazy.”

“Are you somewhere…uninhabited?” he asked. Maybe he could gain some further clue of how to find her.

“Maybe. I haven’t found any other sentient life, but I haven’t looked very hard.” 

They crested a hill, and he could see a primitive-looking village down in the valley. Aketaa walked on, and he realized this must be what she remembered of her home before coming to Skywalker’s academy. The dirt path they followed was gray, and the tall orange grass melted into a shorter yellow type. As they came upon the village, he noted the huts were constructed from woven yellow stalks no thicker than her arms and mats of orange grass. It was deserted.

“So this was meant to become a nightmare,” she said. “Kriffing good thing you showed up, then. Better to have you with me and know this isn’t real than to eventually make my way here with the expectation of seeing the tribe I remember and find it empty.”

There was a thickness in her voice, and as he stepped towards her, she turned to show him the tears rolling over the white lines on her cheeks. To his surprise, Aketaa closed the distance and threw herself against his chest, hands gripping his black jacket. One of her horns banged his nose, but he raised stiff arms to hold her anyway. It felt awkward, but he knew her inhibitions were low and her emotions were high, it being her dream and all. He’d experienced the same feeling himself when she visited his dreams. For her sake, he tried to relax into the hug. It was what he owed her after invading a sensitive dream. 

Admittedly, waiting as Aketaa cried onto his shoulder was not what he planned on doing, but that was fine. There wasn’t exactly a plan in the first place. He just wanted to talk to someone. About what, he didn’t care, really. The longer she went on crying, though, the more he wondered if she would ever stop on her own. Maybe this was the course of the dream and he had to do something to change it. He decided to try that.

“Can I complain about my day?”

She stopped her shuddering sobs and leaned a bit away to look at him. She let go of him with one hand and wiped at her wet face. She nodded. And then she returned to what felt like trying to be as close to him as physically possible, propping her chin on his damp shoulder and wrinkling up his jacket in her fists. But at least she stopped crying.

“I think I wanted to kill my hateful general even more than usual today. He kept giving me those disapproving looks of his during these awful meetings I had to sit through. They were about extremely mundane things like taxes and property rights, if I recall correctly. Then Hux must have fancied himself superior to me and he gave me this whole speech about responsibility and respectability and handling the fate of the First Order, I don’t know, and I had to restrain myself from impaling him then and there. He thinks he’s so smart and so influential, some master strategist and tactician, and suave, too, and he just looks like a rat, honestly. I kriffing hate him.”

He heard a sniff, and then: “What’s stopping you from killing him, exactly?”

“Habit, maybe. There would have been consequences if I killed him before I was Supreme Leader, but now that I am Supreme Leader, I am the one who inflicts the consequences.”

“You might have an uprising on your hands, though. Mutiny on account of tyranny, that sort of thing. Your general’s colleagues might get worried about their own necks if you start killing off the council members you don’t like.”

“Maybe it would make them more compliant.”

“I doubt it. I don’t think your reputation is the right kind of dangerous and powerful for that. More likely they’d think you too temperamental or prone to irrational outbursts or something and seek to replace you with someone they like better. They’re afraid of you, but you’re not stable enough to project impenetrability.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. And you know I’m right. You’re young and inexperienced with politics.”

“I thought you said I was getting old.”

“Hm, only compared to how young we used to be. Compared to your council, who I’m assuming are all at least 50, you’re the young one.” She pulled away, to his relief, and took a step or two back so she could see him. “If you really want to stay in control of your First Order, you’ll have to show them you can stay in control of yourself. That’s my bet.”

For a moment, he studied her. Those golden-yellow eyes of hers were swollen, the whites reddened from crying, as was her angled nose. Despite this, there was a focus in her expression, caught by his mundane talk. He asked, “Why are you advising me on how to be a better Supreme Leader?”

Aketaa sighed and shrugged. “I’m too tired of picking sides. I care about you, Ky, though I don’t agree with your Order. Just because I hate what you stand for doesn’t mean I have to hate you. And I’d say the same thing if you were leading the Resistance. I don’t belong to any faction, Jedi, Resistance, First Order, Knights of Ren, Sith, none of it. I can only be me.”

“Then why spend so much time and energy, even going so far as to hide on a remote planet where you live in isolation, to change my beliefs?”

She frowned and opened her mouth, poised to give him some retort, but she didn’t. Instead, Aketaa closed her mouth and looked down, shaking her head. Her headtails swayed with the motion. Then she sighed and began to talk away, further into the village. Outrage erupted in him. How could she leave him in the middle of a conversation? 

“What are you, some common coward?” he shouted. “Answer the question!”

Voice growing unrealistically faint and distant (he chalked that up to the dream setting), Aketaa yelled back, “It’s the same question I keep answering over and over, you just don’t like it!”

Moderation and anti-extremism, yes, he knew. “I want to hear you say it!” he said, jogging to catch up with her. He found her sitting on a fur cushion in one of the huts, large pelts serving as a layered carpet. It seemed barbaric, but she looked like she fit right in with her bright skin, flashing eyes, and stately horns. “Explain it to me,” he ordered, sitting on a grass pallet across from her. 

“Are you ready to listen?”

“Yes, as long as you’re clear about it. No riddles and ominous declarations like you tried to pull before. Just tell me what you have to tell me.”

She huffed. “Fine. I don’t believe it’s wise to choose sides of the Force. The way I see it, the Force is both Light and Dark, but that doesn’t mean one is inherently better or worse than the other.” Aketaa leaned forward, her longer headtail trailing along the furs. “Good and bad don’t equate to Light and Dark. To say so is to ignore the big picture. Think about the galaxy, the universe, the planet under your feet. All of it follows the cycle of life and death, creation and destruction, in an inevitable pattern that maintains matter and energy: that is the balance of the Force, Ky,” she said, tone insistent and firm. “We as living beings are physically tied to this cycle and this balance, and it’s foolish and arrogant to pretend we are above that simply because we can interact with the energy of the Force.”

As he listened to her words, his mind followed her reasoning through, and he found it an appealing idea. Thinking forward to the next steps of her argument, he said, “You mean to apply this to the nature of individuals, to remove the need for conflict so many Force-users have felt throughout history.”

“You and Rey included,” she nodded. “There is no enlightenment and ascension to complete Light or Dark, just as there are no utopias. Everyone feels fear and love and anger and joy, and everyone has a balance of both Light and Dark in their nature. I don’t see why we can’t embrace them both at once in a mirror of the natural world of which we are a part.”

He recalled the feeling of her Force signature after he finally did away with her shields, and the way the shadows commingled between the bright rays without distress. He was reminded of her repeated use of pain and fear to fuel her power and sharpen her senses when she needed to defend herself. Rey had always done the same.

“I will spend time considering this,” he told her.

She snorted. “Finally.” At his sharp look, she inclined her head. “I know, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be rude when I should be thankful you’re taking me seriously.” Aketaa looked up again to look into his eyes with a golden intensity, and said, “We’ll speak again soon.”

The dream faded away.

—

Upon waking up, Aketaa felt so many emotions she thought she might burst. She thanked the Force and everyone she knew to be in it that he finally, finally had decided to listen to what she had to say. Part of her worried that she was being naive; maybe was going to dismiss her offer of a new way of thinking and decide to hunt her down after all. Furthermore, just because he showed up in her dream and mitigated some of its impact didn’t mean she didn’t still receive the message her mind was telling her. Victory, relief, excitement, anxiety, anticipation, loneliness, yearning. Everything swam together in her head.

She’d just have to wait until he contacted her again. It was annoying, but she understood that Kylo needed time to think, now, and her showing up to pester him about it wouldn’t help her cause. Knowing his stubbornness, it might even cause him to drop the idea altogether if she tried to talk about it too quickly. Yet Aketaa was so heart-wrenchingly lonely, especially after that dream threw it in her face. She’d have to make a change.

Could she really leave Echara though? As time wore on, the winter began to thaw, and though she had heard nothing from Kylo, she was occupied again by the snow melting a little more each day. Life began to return to the forest where the cold had choked it out. When the ground-dwellers came out of their hibernation, Aketaa praised the Force to taste their meat again, and it wasn’t much longer after that before she found sprouts of her flavoring herbs again. Aquamarine vibrancy was returning to the trees, and Aketaa started hearing the singers at night again. The herd must have finally returned to the area.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i sure do hope everyone likes the way i'm writing kylo's pov because i can't decide if it's way too ooc or just the right amount of ooc. either way i'm having fun

“That team of rebels has been spotted again, Supreme Leader,” Hux reported, saying the title as if it were a sour piece of rotted meat on his tongue. “The girl, the pilot, and the deserter.”

Rey. “Where?”

“Vardos, the Jinata system, sir.” The “sir” was almost a sneer.

Just a curt nod from his helmeted head and Hux left, certainly happy to be going and certainly annoyed he had come in the first place. It was no secret to him that Hux hated his new position as second to Kylo Ren, running around doing errands for Kylo Ren, having to answer to Kylo Ren, reporting to Kylo Ren. He had never liked Hux and didn’t need his approval or admiration, and he probably would enjoy the weasel’s frustration if it weren’t for those pesky thoughts of treason and mutiny as clear as if he were screaming them aloud. Not that he cared much about being Supreme Leader, anyway. Not now that he had to participate in the politics he once could scoff at and avoid with simple intimidation, and not now that he was warming to the idea of the cyclic universe.

Rey was on Vardos. He found he couldn’t care less about what she was doing there. After all, she was surely doing Resistance work that would surely accomplish something small in an effort to accomplish something larger that would surely produce a significant annoyance for the First Order. That seemed most likely, since the Jinata system was well-controlled by the Order. As far as he knew, there was no reason for her to be there if she were pursuing something in an effort to rekindle the Jedi religion or even to build a new religion from the Jedi ashes. If she were doing that, he’d be more interested, but he supposed she could do whatever she wanted on behalf of the Resistance and he would never in a million years be able to stop her. One day she really would bring the whole empire crashing down for good, and he certainly wouldn’t shed any tears. Snoke brought him to the First Order, Snoke and his own spite and anger and betrayed trust—he didn’t seek this path out on his own.

If it weren’t for Snoke, he probably would never have given Skywalker cause for concern in the first place. The academy would have gone on successfully and churned out a generation of new Jedi, and he would never have become a murderer or a traitor. But it had happened. There was no changing the past now. Better to think of the now and think of what was ahead.

He decided he would ignore the actions of Rey and her friends in the Jinata system. Kriff what Hux would say. Kriff what they all would say. Maybe that was exactly what he’d tell Rey, too, the next time the Force decided to open up their bond. He’d tell her he was tired, and he was bored, and he didn’t care anymore. There was a bigger picture he hadn’t been looking at until it was thrust in front of his face so that he couldn’t look away, and he knew that the Force was bigger than Snoke, bigger than the Skywalker line, bigger than all the history of the galaxy. The First Order and the Resistance, they were just part of the push-and-pull of the balance. Aketaa was right, and he’d spent almost two months now becoming more and more certain. He’d tell Rey so.

As it happened, the bond opened not an hour later. The Force heard him, apparently, and wanted to see if he’d go back on his resolve yet again. She was at the end of a long corridor, spying around the corner. He hurried to catch up to her, whipping his head around to make sure no troopers were nearby, and pulled his helmet off when he was just steps from her back.

“Rey.”

“Don’t you see me ignoring you?” she hissed. She must not have been alone.

“If General Hux attempts to usurp me, I’m going to let him.”

“Go on ahead,” Rey called around the corner. “I want to check something. I’ll catch up!” She turned to face him, and he could notice for the first time since she had closed the door on him how her freckles patterned her face. “If I didn’t know better I’d say you just admitted you’re on the wrong side.”

“That’s reading into it. Don’t put words in my mouth. I don’t want to be Supreme Leader anymore, is all.”

Rey raised one eyebrow. “So you’re having a mid-life crisis?”

“I’ve been talking to an old friend, and I gained a new perspective.”

“Sounds to me like a mid-life crisis. Have you thought about buying a new speeder?”

He scowled. “I’m being serious.”

“Fine. So you’ll give up this power, but what happens next? Is it back to commanding the military or are you leaving the First Order and joining the Resistance?” Something softened in her face, and her eyes warmed just enough that he remembered how they looked reflecting the fire in the hut. “Leia would welcome you back. We could make the whole Resistance welcome you back.”

“No one would ever trust me, not after everything I did,” he sighed. “Anyway, I don’t want to join the Resistance. If Hux stages a coup, I’ll leave. I’ll go into exile.”

Wrinkling her nose, she said, “Well, you don’t have to be so dramatic. But I suppose—if, of course, you don’t change your mind and decide to come home—it would be a good idea to lay low a while.” She jumped and looked over her shoulder. “I have to go. Good luck.” 

She didn’t look back at him as she turned to dash around the corner. When he stepped forward to check if she was still there, all he saw was an empty hallway, except for a trooper stationed outside the door to some admiral’s quarters. He sighed. The longest conversation he’d held with Rey in months, and it was already over. At least she had spoken to him at all. That was a definite improvement over almost all of their encounters since that kriffing salt planet. There was a council meeting he was late to now, but he might as well just skip it entirely. Let Hux get mad and hissy, why not? Something light and warm, a little like elation, lifted in his stomach; now that he had committed to his abandonment of the First Order out loud, he felt almost free. He turned on his heel and strode back to his own quarters, council be damned.

—

She was meditating, Krishden was asleep in the ship, and sun was high in the sky casting a comfortable warmth over her skin. Spring seemed to be in its full glory, and Aketaa was glad to be able to sit in the soft grass without the ground freezing her legs.

Then she felt a pressure, like someone squeezing her wrist, and suddenly she was tugged into a new set of senses. Her own face stared at her, head nestled carefully on the orange arm to avoid crushing her side lek against the pillow, a pose so familiar she knew it must be a memory. It couldn’t be her own memory; it came on too suddenly for that, and of course she didn’t have memories of her own face like that. Kylo.

“We could run away,” the memory-Aketaa was saying. “Being away from the pressure of the academy and away from your uncle, it could help. And I could be there for you whenever you start feeling bad, and you wouldn’t have to keep it all bottled up, you know? We wouldn’t have to be so careful around each other,” she whispered.

The memory crackled, like bad reception on a holo projector, and then Kylo’s voice was speaking out of her mouth. “We can’t,” he said. How strange to feel speech without it resonating in the montrals. “It would be impossible. We’d never make it out of the hangar without Luke knowing, and even if we did, he’d be able to find us no matter where we went.”

Aketaa watched herself sigh. Did her eyes always look like molten gold or was that just Kylo’s perception? When memory-Aketaa rolled away and sat up, she realized she had never really seen how the white stripes on her shoulders and hips wrapped around and tapered off on her back. Interesting. It was pretty; she liked it. The image and her grasp of Kylo’s senses flickered and came in and out of focus again. Her head filled with static, and then it was replaced with the squeezing again, and then it was over.

His voice was in her head, just simple thought communication: “Projecting that isn’t as easy as you made it seem.”

“I’ve had practice,” she replied. “Was that a message?”

There was a touch of sulking. “Yes.”

“Have you finally decided to follow my suggestion? You’re only a decade late.”

“I talked to Rey,” he told her. “She knows I’m going to let Hux overthrow me if it comes to that.”

“I’m glad you two are speaking again.”

“Maybe.”

“I’m not telling you where I am, if that’s what you want to know. I don’t want that to be First Order knowledge.”

“I understand.”

His presence withdrew, and the feeling of the Force currents of Echara returned to her awareness. Aketaa knew the exact memory he had made an effort to show her. The one time she had seriously suggested that they leave Master Luke’s Jedi academy coincided with the one time they had seriously done anything physical together. It was the closest she had been with him, and the first time either of them had been so intimate with anyone. At the time, she still hoped she could help Ben Solo, but it wasn’t very long before he made it extremely clear that he could not be helped. Now, though, he was telling her it was never too late for her to help him. She smiled.

—

The Force, yet again, in its infinite irritating wisdom, opened the bond not even a week after he last spoke to Rey. He was sort of skimming a new law proposed by one of the council members that he didn’t care about reading, and she was asleep. Everything went muffled, so he looked up from the datapad, and Rey was just—there. Curled up in his bed. It was another vulnerable moment, and once again he tried not to disturb her. He wondered if the bond had ever opened while he was asleep before. He wouldn’t know, but Rey would. What would she have done? How would she have reacted? Would she have scowled, rolled her eyes, wrinkled her nose at his presence? Or would her eyes have softened, her brow gentled? Maybe she would have reached out to smooth his hair or straighten the blankets he always managed to kick away and tangle up in his sleep. Then he realized—Force knew how many times the bond might have opened while they were both asleep and unaware.

Rey turned over, tightened up into an even smaller ball, and sighed. He wanted to hold her and never let her go, but he didn’t dare get up from his chair. He barely even breathed. After what seemed like an eternity, he blinked, and she vanished. With a sigh, he tried to turn his attention back to the datapad before him. It was something about new regulations for a mining colony he’d never heard of before but was apparently under the control of the First Order. 

He just didn’t care. So what if the First Order wanted a more productive industry to fund their expansion? It wouldn’t last forever. Whether he approved the new regulations or not, it wouldn’t make any lasting difference. So, fine, if they forced him to give an opinion, he’d go along with the majority opinion of his council. That is, he would if he ever made it back into the chamber. Hux would turn purple if he refused to appear for council meetings, and that was a sight he might like to see. The general’s face would go purple, and he’d scowl in that weak and watery way of his before shaking so hard in anger that he’d rattle in his polished boots.

So entertaining was that mental image that he opened the door of his quarters only to slam it shut in Hux’s face when he came calling. He watched on the security feed as Hux steeped in his own rage for a minute before clicking away down the corridor. This happened again when the next council meeting rolled around. And again. And again. And again until he realized he had skipped twelve meetings and hadn’t appeared outside of his personal quarters in almost a month. At some point, the days had begun to melt together. It was probably time to throw his officials a bone and show up to a meeting.

“So good of you to join us, Supreme Leader,” drawled a particularly old and stuffy member of the council, a general appointed to oversee foreign policy.

They all proceeded to toss thinly-veiled scornful remarks his way through the entire three-hour session. It wasn’t insulting so much as it was vexing. He was happy to exit the room without having said more than a few words throughout the entire ordeal. Of course, he did not attend the following meeting.

“If you intend to become a recluse and a figurehead,” Hux spat at him one day, “then so be it. But I won’t put up with your tantrums if things stop going your way because of it.”

They were in the lift, so he could hardly duck out of the conversation, but he rolled his eyes nonetheless. “I assure you, if things stop going my way, and they start going your way, you’ll have more than a tantrum to contend with.” It was sort of an empty threat, and Hux looked smug enough that he probably knew it. 

The weasel knew how to conceal most of what was in his head from the casual inquirer, but if he tried to use the gentler touch he was starting to get accustomed to, it was like gliding through a velocity-sensitive defense shield. Hux thought himself the champion, the victor, the one in the right. That was fine. Let him think he was winning. Why not? It would make his escape from this dissatisfying life come sooner.

—

She was floating on her back in the middle of a vast body of water. It smelled of salt. She felt nothing, not cold, not warmth, not even the lapping of water echoing inside her montrals or the chafing of all the wet layers she was wearing. There was only peace and weightlessness. The sky was dark and full of so many bright stars that it almost hurt her eyes to look at one directly. Lifting her head, she saw a white bird with a gracefully round head sitting on her stomach and looking at her, as if expecting her to say something.

“What’s your name?” Aketaa asked it.

“I don’t have one. I’m not finished,” it answered. It had humanoid teeth inside a beak that somehow acted like a lipped mouth as it spoke.

“What isn’t finished about you?”

The bird lifted its wings, but they weren’t wings. They were bloody stubs, soaking the white feathers down its sides with dark red-black. “I’ll never fly. I’ll always drown until I’m finished.”

Cold from the water seeped all the way to her bones, and her waterlogged robes were too heavy for her to lift her arms. Aketaa could only watch as the bird hopped off her stomach and into the water, only to dye itself bloody red as it sank further and further down into the depths of the endless sea.

“Wait,” she said. She struggled against the water. “Wait!” Aketaa tried to rock from side to side so she could turn over and yell, “Why aren’t you finished?” to the sinking bird. Tears ran down her cheeks, and they tasted bitter, saltier than the sea she was trapped in.

Hands gripped under her shoulders, steadying her and lifting her upright. Her feet hit the bottom, and she stood up in the waist-deep saltwater. The hands turned her around, and Aketaa was faced with Kylo’s frowning eyebrows. She realized she was shaking, and her legs were wobbly, and she was glad he was still holding her by her upper arms.

“That was a weird dream,” he said.

“Where did you come from?” Aketaa asked. For a second, before he spoke, she had accepted him as a new part of the unfolding events, but figures in dreams don’t tell you that you’re in a dream, usually. And they certainly don’t announce that the dream was (meaning it was over) weird.

His scowl deepened. “It’s your dream. I just showed up in the water. Can’t you dream up a shore or an island or something?”

Aketaa thought about saying that no, she couldn’t, just to spite his sour attitude, but she wanted to sit down on solid ground. She looked to her left, and there was a long stretch of sandy beach with no waves, just a smooth incline of the land out of the water. Together, they trudged up and out of the sea and collapsed on the fine, pale sand. As Aketaa flopped onto her back, holding her lekku over her shoulders to keep them from getting squished, she could feel Kylo looking at her. It wasn’t really a glare. It was closer to stern, maybe disgruntled.

“What, Ky?” she asked.

“This is the second dream where you’re alone.”

“Do you have a problem with that?”

“No, but I think you must.”

In the complete silence of the dream-night, she sighed. “I’ve been alone in a lot of my dreams recently, now that you’ve made me think about it. If you hadn’t interrupted that Mos Eisley one, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was supposed to end up abandoned in an emptied-out city. Like I said that other time, isolation is making me crazy.”

“Want company?”

“I told you, I don’t want my location known to the First Order.”

“Well, my idiot general finally had enough and tried to have my guards arrest me. I’m floating in my TIE fighter right now.”

“Wow.” Aketaa was impressed that he was giving up his power so readily, even though it was the path of least resistance. “And you let them herd you out of your base just like that?”

He paused for a long moment before answering, “I was sick of politics anyway.”

Nodding, Aketaa said, “You wanted to be the hand holding the blaster, but you discovered you liked being the blaster itself much better, is that it?”

“That’s an over-simplification, but I suppose, yes.”

“You could be lying to me.”

“Search me when you wake up. I’ll even stay meditating to make it easier.”

“Fine.”

“Good.”

—

When he came back to himself, it felt like a door had been slammed in his face. She must have pushed him out of the dream. He had done the same to her in the past. It was an odd sensation to just…allow himself to be booted like that from someone’s head without putting up a fight. Considering it for a brief moment, he found he didn’t mind at all. And then he remembered he was supposed to still be meditating to let Aketaa verify that what he said was true. Of course it was true; he had decided a long time ago that there was no point in lying to her. The expanse of stars spread in front of his face in the view out the TIE fighter viewport was as soothing as it was intimidating. Endless possibility, and yet no idea where to go. A backwater planet, probably, where they wouldn’t know what the Supreme Leader looked like.

He felt her probe in his mind, then, and tried to relax into the feeling of having someone poke around inside his head. Again, he realized he didn’t mind it, even if her signature was stormy and her search was a little rough. As he’d said, it had been a weird dream. He couldn’t fault her for being upset. It was only a minute or two before he felt her stop, withdrawing from his memories, though her presence was still there, hesitating. She was considering something. He couldn’t tell what it was, but he could sense her internal conflict as she struggled to decide whatever it was. A flash of fear and worry, blotted out by something like desperation, then reluctance, then a whining sadness. Should he try to tell her that she didn’t have to make what seemed to be an important decision so soon after waking up from a bad dream? No, wait, he could feel her resolve, tinged with both resignation and relief. He felt tense suddenly, like she had opened her mouth to speak but hesitated, leaving him waiting with bated breath.

“Echara,” he heard, finally.

Her presence retreated, having accomplished what she intended. He didn’t know what Echara was, but it was reasonable to guess that was the name of her hiding place. Aketaa had decided to trust him and offered him space in her sanctuary. He was surprised, and he was pleased, and he felt eager to see his old friend, really see her, not just the mental image she sent him. The maps on his fighter showed him no results for the planet’s name, but he thought he knew where he could find some directions. It was a gamble, and it might get him in more trouble than he would like to get into, but it was the only lead he could come up with. With a sigh, he set a course for Tatooine.

There wasn’t any ambient noise in the little ship for the Force bond to block out, so it startled him when Rey leaned her head over his shoulder and into his peripheral vision from the empty seat behind him.

“I feel a bit claustrophobic,” she said. “Are we in your fighter?”

“Yes.”

“I heard about the coup.”

“You must have very efficient spies.”

Rey hummed noncommittally. “So I assume you’re flying out into exile, then?”

“I am.”

“You wouldn’t tell me where, would you?”

He could feel her breath against his cheek. He wanted to tell her. “I—I can’t compromise the trust of the one willing to shelter me,” he said instead.

“Well, I can’t imagine they have any sympathy for the Resistance if they’re willing to take you in. Harboring the overthrown Supreme Leader can’t be good for their reputation with either side,” Rey mused, evidently sitting back in the seat as she moved out of his field of vision. 

“She doesn’t care much about either side, as I understand it.”

Rey scoffed. “How could anyone not care?”

Pushing the TIE fighter into hyperspace, he answered, “She believes in balance. Apparently she believes the First Order will fall, and so will the Resistance, in time.” After a pause, he added, “If it makes you feel better, she probably would have been in your Resistance if she hadn’t gone into hiding before the Resistance was ever formed.”

“Oh.” She went quiet, but he still felt her presence.

Swallowing down a sudden twinge of nerves, he asked, “Where are you right now?”

“The Falcon’s cockpit. Everyone else is asleep.” She sighed. “You’re in Chewy’s seat right now.”

“Heading anywhere interesting?”

“Just back to base to rendezvous with Leia. She’ll want to look for you, send me out to bring you home.” There was the fabric rustling of her shifting in her seat. “You could let me, Ben.”

“Maybe someday,” he offered. “I know it would cause tension within your organization if my mother brought me into it.”

“It would,” Rey agreed, “but nothing good comes easily.”

He only had time to sigh before her presence was gone. There was nothing he wanted more than to see her come find him again, but Aketaa would probably object to the Resistance knowing about her hideout. Maybe he could find a different way to see Rey.

—

The forest looked like the one from her adolescence, when she was at Luke’s academy, all green and lush. Except it was full of people: from all walks of life, wearing the styles of every culture she’d ever seen, talking and laughing with each other and creating a din that was too loud in her montrals, so loud it was almost deafening. None of the people could see her, or hear her, and every time she tried to reach out and touch them, they turned and walked away. She was confused, then she was scared, and then she was frantic, running through the crowds, dodging trees and underbrush, trying to make any of them pay attention to her, but no one acknowledged her no matter what she tried, until finally she almost ran face-first into Luke Skywalker.

“Master,” she gasped.

“Aketaa,” he said.

“Why can’t they see me?”

“To them, you do not exist. You have to make yourself known.”

“I tried. I’m trying!”

“You have to finish the work.”“What?”

“Your ideas exist, but they mean nothing until you know what to do about them. I spent the last years of my life doing nothing until it was too late. Do not make the same mistake.”

Luke’s face was stern, and almost disapproving, and Aketaa fell to her knees and asked, “What would you have me do? Aren’t I doing enough?”

“You will fade into obscurity, alone, with no one to remember your name.”

“No,” she pleaded. “I don’t want to be alone anymore! I don’t want to be alone.”

“Finish the work.”

A voice behind her—Kylo’s voice—cut in: “That’s enough, Skywalker.” He sounded weary, annoyed.

“Ben?” Surprise bloomed over Luke’s bearded face as he looked past Aketaa. “How are you here?”

“We’ve made a habit of dropping into each other’s bad dreams,” Kylo explained curtly. “Would you stop being so cryptic and just explain what in the kriffing Force it is you’re trying to have Aketaa do?”

Luke dissolved, and so did all the oblivious crowds in the forest. Aketaa turned, rolling off her knees to sit on the ground facing Kylo. He looked frustrated.

“Ky? Was that a vision from Master Luke or just a dream?” she asked him. “I can’t—I can’t tell.”

“His presence wasn’t with you, not that I could sense.” Kylo considered her for a moment before sitting down as well, criss-crossing his legs. “You know…you’re not going to be alone. I’m trying to get to you.”

“How close are you?”

“Tatooine. I tried to find your Twi’lek, Ryla, but I was unsuccessful. No one wants to talk to someone who stepped out of a TIE fighter. It might have been easier to crash it in the desert, but I didn’t think of it when I was landing.”

“Sell it and buy a new ship. Pose as a bounty hunter for a while, maybe.”

“Maybe.” He paused. “What’s the work you’re supposed to be doing? That bird thing in the last dream said something about not being finished, and now you’re dreaming of Luke telling you to finish something.”

Aketaa shook her head and pulled her knees up to her chest. “I don’t know. Luke really did visit me in the Force ages ago and told me I had to find the balance he couldn’t figure out, or something, and get you to understand it too. I thought he meant for me to start over, come up with another Force religion that isn’t the Jedi or the Sith.”

“Tall order.”

“I suppose.”

Kylo sighed. “Founding a new order is too big a task for one Force user, even if you have come to some very compelling conclusions already. I don’t think it has to be finished in your lifetime. And, there are many other traditions in the galaxy that are neither Jedi nor Sith. I joined one of them.”

“The Knights of Ren, yes. But those are Dark siders.”

“The First Order had records of many groups of Force sensitives so that we could snuff them out if they ever appeared again. I doubt all of them were exactly Light or Dark. Some seemed to just be specific to a species or a planet.”

“Hmm.” Aketaa raised a hand to rub at the junction of her montral and forehead. She had a headache from the dream crowds. “You said you’re on Tatooine?”

“Yes.”

“It took me three hyperspace jumps to get to Echara from Tatooine, and I was in that same old gunship I stole from the academy.”

“Noted.”

She took a deep breath, staring down at the moss and leaf litter carpeting the forest floor. Not alone this time, but perhaps this was worse, to be surrounded by people and still feel alone. Except, she reminded herself, Kylo was in the dream with her, and he would come stay with her on Echara. Most likely not forever, just for a while, but she wouldn’t be alone. When did they trade roles? Now, she was the one with nightmares and he was the one breaking her out of them—how interesting that he chose to keep coming back to her in her dreams when she knew he could tell when she was awake and meditating. He chose to comfort her now three dreams in a row.

—

“There’s sand in my mouth. Ugh. I don’t miss Jakku one bit,” Rey said. “Why are you on a desert planet?”

He kept walking, aware that the marketplace in Mos Eisley wasn’t the best place to stop and have a conversation with an invisible person. “Stopping to get a new ship and information.”

“Ooh, I hope you know how to haggle.”

“That won’t be necessary.”“You’re delusional. It’ll be necessary. No one ever gives you the best price upfront.”

Actually, he hadn’t thought about that. He’d never been in a position where he had to buy something for himself. “I’m sure I can handle it.”

“You’re going to get swindled,” she said, keeping pace with him. She looked very close to laughing. “You have no idea what a decent ship’s worth out here, do you?”

He didn’t answer her.

“Alright, they’ll give you a price that’s too high. What you’re gonna do is offer a low price, lower than you’re actually willing to pay. They’ll come back with something high, but better, and you hit them with a low but less low offer, and that goes back and forth until you come to an agreement. If a seller’s not willing to negotiate the price at first, you walk away, and if they really want to make a sale they’ll come after you with something better. Whatever you do, don’t let on that you’re desperate, because then they know you’ll be willing to pay anything to get what you need and you’ll get ripped off. Got it?”

“Of course.” Not at all. This was ridiculous. 

“Great. I have to go. Good luck, Ben!”

The sounds of the market came back, and he realized this was going to be a test of patience the likes of which he had not faced in a very long time. He was right. He almost pulled his lightsaber out to behead the first vendor he tried to speak with, and the only thing that stopped him was knowing how poorly everyone nearby would react to a red saber. It would be smart to get a blaster, but the Supreme Leader of the First Order didn’t carry credits around in his pockets, so he sold his gloves, his cloak, and his belted jacket, all made of fine materials, and bought a pistol and holster. Less conspicuous than the saber by far, which he clipped to the waist of his pants under his shirt and mostly out of sight. Now that he looked a little more like he belonged in the city, sellers offered him better prices for the ships they showed him on their holoprojectors; clearly they hoped to get more money from a man in good clothes, and figured they couldn’t ask as much from one in a plain shirt with a common blaster at his hip. He had never been good with subtle mind tricks due to his temper, but going back and forth with one lumpy-looking creature, he was able to persuade it to take his TIE fighter in exchange for a gunship more suited to traveling, despite the being’s initial protests over coming into possession of a First Order craft. Walking back to the landing bays, he wondered what would become of the fighter. Would anyone want to be flying around in something like that? He thought of Rey’s presence projected into the back seat, and wondered if the only thing the ship was good for now was its individual parts. 

“Must register ownership of new craft,” the creature said in its waxy voice, holding out a datapad. When he hesitated, it cocked its bulbous head. “Unless…under table? Off grid?”

No, that wouldn’t do. He couldn’t afford to encounter any First Order patrols with a ship that didn’t at least appear to be registered legally. “I’ll register,” he said, taking the datapad. Then he hesitated again. He couldn’t just make up fake numbers for all his identification, could he? No, no that was an equally bad idea. If he wanted to do this, he’d have to do it properly. “Do you know where I can get this identification?”

“Will generate, will generate, no problem. Cost extra credits?”

He pulled the remaining credits after his blaster purchase out of his pocket and offered them to the creature. It…grinned, sort of, and swiped them up, nodding. “No problem, no problem,” it repeated, taking the datapad back and tapping a few buttons. “Name for identification?”

“Ky--Ben…Soloren?” he fumbled, having never considered what he should call himself now. 

The creature looked at him. “Type name,” it said, holding the datapad out again. He felt a wave of exasperation from it, and he couldn’t blame it.

Ben Solo didn’t exist anymore, and it could raise red flags with the First Order. Kylo Ren would raise red flags with the First Order and everywhere else. He hated both names, anyway; neither name felt like it fit him anymore. Aketaa called him Ky, and he didn’t mind it. Ky, then? Maybe short for Kyben, why not. That sounded like a first name. He needed a surname. Was it lame to use another combo, or should he come up with something completely new? This was hard. He didn’t have to go by this name for the rest of his life, sure, and he probably wouldn’t, but this felt like an important milestone all the same. He typed K-Y-B-E-N; that was a start. His mother’s surname was famous, his father’s surname was famous, he didn’t want to be Ren. Kriff. Wait, Aketaa had a surname, could he use hers? Would that be weird? That would be weird. Fine, lame combination, then. He typed S-O-L-E-N, sounded the whole thing out in his head, and added another O. Kyben Soleno. That sounded pretty good. At last, he gave the datapad back to the being trying to sell him this ship.

Kyben Soleno. Now he couldn’t decide whether he liked it or hated it. He almost asked for the datapad back to change it, but he saw from the screen it was too late.

“Upload identification to ship, no problem. Registered for Kyben,” it said, giving him a grin and handing over an access fob for the ship’s entry ramp. “Fighter?”

“It’s all yours,” he said. “The only TIE/vn fighter on Tatooine, I’m sure.”

The vendor nodded and started to stroll away, back to the market stalls. “Good business, sir, good business today!” it called as it left.

So now he had a ship. No idea how to figure out where Echara was, but at least he had a way to get there.

—

Breathe in, breathe out. In, out. Feel the life, feel the death. Growth, decay. The sunlight, and the shadows. Inhale oxygen. Exhale carbon dioxide. Breathe in, breathe out. She could hear the burrowers, felt the twitch of plant life crushed between their teeth. Fish in the pond, and yes, taloned birds catching them up. Fungus fed on the fallen leaves and twigs.

She felt Kylo Ren’s Force signature systems upon systems away and tapped in, catching his feelings of impatience, curiosity, frustration, and a dash of freedom. 

“I’d send you coordinates if I could,” she directed to him.

“Certainly would make my life easier,” he answered.

“My ship has been powered down for so long I don’t know if I could get its systems running again.”

“Have you tried?”

“…No.”

“I’m exerting a lot of effort on my side. You could do something.”

Kylo withdrew, and Aketaa opened her eyes. Krishden was nosing around near her foot, bare again now that the weather had truly settled into warmth. With a sigh, she stood and walked up the ramp into the bay of her ship. Dead leaves had blown in, the metal floor was layered with dirt and moss, and the hinges of the ramp were probably so rusted she might not be able to raise it at all. She forced open the sliding door to the cockpit, which was pristine by comparison to the rest of the ship, though it was still quite dusty. Sitting in the pilot’s seat for the first time since landing, Aketaa held her breath and started flipping switches and pushing buttons, only faltering a couple times as she went through the startup sequence. As she expected, the computer was damaged after practically a year without use. Chunks of her charts were corrupted or missing entirely, and the navigation system could barely run at all. The diagnostics check software was even a little wonky, and Aketaa wouldn’t have trusted its report if she were actually trying to get the ship off the ground. But, despite everything that was wrong, the readout of her current coordinates seemed okay when she checked them against the half-readable logs of her hyperspace jumps. They’d at least get Kylo close, within the system at worst. She refocused, found his signature again, and pushed the coordinates to him. She felt his “ugh, finally!” with perfect clarity.

Even after she shut everything down again, Aketaa stayed in the chair. The crate with her lightsaber was still shoved under the dashboard, and she felt compelled to bend down and lift the lid, reach inside and search blindly through clothes she forgot she owned, until her fingers came in contact with the cool metal of her saber hilt.


End file.
